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MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 



MORALE 
AND ITS ENEMIES 



BY 

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING 
Author of "Human Nature and Its Remaking," etc 




NEW HAVEN 

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON— HUMPHREY MILFORD-OXFORD UNIVERSITY 

PRESS 
MDCCCCXVIII 



*ft 



Copyright, 191S, by 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



DEC 23 1918 
©CI.A511033 



i 



TO THE YOUNG OFFICERS 
OF THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE 
WHO AS CHIEF BUILDERS OF THE MORALE 
OF A GREAT ARMY DO MUCH TO SHAPE 
THAT OF THE NATION FOR YEARS TO COME 



PREFACE 

Wab carries the minds as well as the bodies of men 
into strange paths, and so creates an unwonted need 
for self-understanding. At the same time, the 
power and the leisure for self -understanding are di- 
minished. Men, as well as nations, must choose 
their part quickly, discern their friends and their 
enemies, revise all plans, leap to strange tasks at 
the call of the moment, though all the questions of 
politics and of metaphysics are involved in the deed. 
And while the decision reached may reveal the 
solvency or insolvency of the soul that issues it, the 
need to bring together the fragments of one 's mental 
life remains, and will remain for long after the war 
is past. 

This book is an attempt to help — the soldier first, 
and also the civilian — in this task of understanding 
one's own mind, under the special stresses of war. 
There must be many such attempts, from different 
angles of experience : one can only contribute from 
his own angle, that of the student of human nature 
and of philosophy, aided by certain special oppor- 
tunities which I owe to the courtesy of the Foreign 
Offices of Great Britain and France. 

The summer of 1917 I spent in Europe. On the 
evening of the eighth of August, four of us, under 
conduct of the British War Office, climbed out of 
Boulogne in army motors, and made our way across 

VII 



VIII PREFACE 

the country-side of Pas de Calais, through villages 
black as the night itself, except for a stealthy chink 
of light here and there in the crack of a window, 
past trains of loaded lorries, detachments of sol- 
diers and workmen, toward the front. At one high 
point of the road with a clearing toward the north 
and east we saw the night sky broken by sudden 
flares and dangling signal-lights faint in the dis- 
tance : there was the cockpit ; there the man-power of 
great nations was straining in mud and rain against 
all the devices the brain of a cunning enemy could 
bring to crush its life and spirit and endurance. 
The will-to-live of the nations was in those tortured 
bodies. If there were any super-men in the world 
during the first years of the war, they were not 
among those who went out confident in all the freight 
of German war-lore and munitions, but among those 
who withstood them. 

During the days that followed, we were with these 
men, in the billets, in the trenches at Croisilles, at 
training camp, at hospital. From Kemmel Hill, we 
followed as best we could, their deadly labors on the 
earth and in the air, in the region of "Wipers," 
Westhoek, and Messines. Later on, with another 
group, we met poilus of France, 'at home,' if you 
like, in their own war zone, in the devastated regions 
about Chauny, in the active sectors about Soissons 
and the Chemin des Dames. They were all men 
without visible haloes, — for the most part tired, de- 
termined, matter-of-fact men, unconscious of either 
greatness or special virtue other than that of having 
chosen, in a mortal crisis, as men must. 



PREFACE IX 

Through these and other experiences one is put 
on his guard against one illusion that besets the 
reading of the mind of war, the inglorious exterior of 
its often glorious inner life. It is not alone the case 
that in war the pendulum of experience swings be- 
tween wide, even wild, extremes ; but that the realism 
and the idealism of the event jostle and seem to belie 
one another. In the descriptive literature of the war 
we have vivid human documents for the one and the 
other side of the picture ; the true picture must in- 
clude them both, and interpret them. 

The idealism of war tends to concentrate about the 
notion of " morale,' ' a highly practical and specific 
virtue for the purposes of war. What morale means, 
the invisible force behind war-making, became an al- 
most tangible fact at the front; and hardly less so 
in the regions back of the front, in the towns and vil- 
lages, which had borne a load of suffering, anxiety, 
and loss such as we in America know nothing about. 

Morale is the practical virtue of the will to war. 
But if we know how to build the morale of the nation 
and the army for war purposes, we shall have a 
spiritual asset lasting well into the times after the 
war. The esprit de corps which war requires, and 
helps to bring about, need not be evanescent. The 
military virtues have traditionally stood by them- 
selves, as distinct from the qualities needed in times 
of peace; my belief is that this is a short-sighted 
conception, even from the military point of view, 
and that our new armies made on a different prin- 
ciple will demonstrate that fact. 



X PREFACE 

And there is a wider element in the psyche of this 
war which must not be evanescent, and cannot be: 
I mean the international esprit de corps which has 
been created among the members of the Allied arms 
including their junior associate, the discoveries of 
people by people, brought about by the forced mental 
excursions of war. 

There have been critics of England among us, and 
critics of France ; but no one who had fairly known 
the England or the France that bore the brunt of 
the war could have continued to hold these feelings 
dominant. England is inwardly the most diverse of 
all nations : it is not identical with any single party 
or government; judged by the acts and opinions 
of fragments here and there, or of Parliaments or of 
cabinets, it is not faultless, — and I know of no nation 
that is. But the phrases, "the heart of England," 
or "the soul of France," are not empty phrases: it 
is by the quality of its persistent national purposes 
that a people is to be judged. 

There are traits in the England of John Bull and 
Tory tradition, just as there are in the America of 
dollar- worshipping tradition, which have few lovers 
in the world, and deserve few. But this is not 
America; nor are these England. There is a con- 
siderate and liberal England, an England that 
sweareth to its own hurt and changeth not, a chival- 
rous England, a nobly generous England, eager to 
give in all ways more than due credit to its associates 
and neighbors. These are the real England. Let me 
quote here a few words from a letter that came to 
me recently: 

1 ' And before anything else, I must express to you 



PREFACE XI 

my intense thankfulness for the wonderful support 
and defence which your great country has offered 
to the allied cause and to England. The last week 
of March was very anxious; I hardly knew at the 
time, how anxious. I don't say we might not have 
pulled through unaided, but the certainty and rap- 
idity of the relief were unquestionably due to you. 
I do not ignore the universality of your motive — 
to do right . . . but still, the greater involves the 
less, and we do owe you a debt which you could not 
realize, without having shared those black weeks 
with us. What you did will never be forgotten while 
England is a people. 

"By comparison it is a minor matter, and almost 
humorous after my writing to you last year about 
our self denial, that my having had plenty of wheat 
bread this last six months is due, I gather, to your 
having denied it to yourself. The whole thing is 
wonderful, and I should think, unprecedented in the 
world's history." 

Think of these as words on the lips of England, 
and think of what England, her provinces, and her 
allies, have sacrificed in this cause which from the 
first was ours. What have we done that we should 
not proudly have done again and again? Let it 
stand as a unique fact, if it is such; but only as 
beginnings are unique. Let it, together with the 
spirit that answers it, put an end forever to the 
superstition that nations, as corporate entities, are 
debarred from the expressions of good-will and 
gratitude that cement the bonds between man and 
man. William Ernest Hocking. 

New York City, November 6, 1918. 



NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Some of the substance of this book has already 
been presented in the form of lectures to the Train- 
ing Corps at Williams College in the winter of 1917, 
and as the Bromley Lectures at Yale in the spring 
of 1918. I also presented for preliminary criticism 
by the service a set of psychological theses in The 
Infantry Journal for April, 1918 ; in the second part 
of this book I have profited by the comment that has 
come to me. Three of the chapters have appeared 
in approximately their present form: the first and 
second in The Atlantic Monthly current, the fifteenth 
in the Yale Review for July 1918, 



CONTENTS 

PAET I— FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH . . 3 

II. WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE ? 14 

III. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE: INSTINCTS 

AND FEELINGS 24 

IV. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE: KNOWLEDGE 

AND BELIEF 33 

V. REALIZING THE WAR 42 

VI. ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 53 

Vn. THE PURPOSES OF POTSDAM 61 

VIII. THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 67 

IX. STATE-BLINDNESS 78 



PAET II— MORALE OF THE FIGHTING 

MAN 

x. psychology of the soldier .... 95 

xi. discipline and will .... . 118 

xii. prestige: the psychology of command . 131 

XIII. MORALE-BUILDING factors 142 

XIV. FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 153 

XV. WAR AND WOMEN 168 

XVI. LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 189 

XV 



PART I 
FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE 



MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 



CHAPTER I 

WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 

War is no doubt the least human of human relation- 
ships. It can begin only when persuasion ends, 
when arguments fitted to move minds are replaced 
by the blasting-powder fitted to move rocks and 
hills. It means that one at least of the national 
wills concerned has deliberately set aside its hu- 
man quality, — as only a human will can do, — and 
has made of itself just such a material obstruction 
or menace. Hence war seems, and is often called, 
a contest of brute forces. Certainly, it is the ex- 
tremest physical effort men make, every resource 
of vast populations bent to increase the sum of 
power at the front, where the two lines writhe like 
wrestlers laboring for the final fall. 

Yet it is seldom physical force that decides a long 
war. For war summons skill against skill, head 
against head, staying-power against staying-power, 
as well as numbers and machines against machines 
and numbers. When an engine "exerts itself" it 
spends more power, eats more fuel, but uses no 
nerve: when a man exerts himself, he must bend 
his will to it. The extremer the physical effort, the 

3 



4 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

greater the strain on the inner or moral powers. 
Hence the paradox of war: just because it calls 
for the maximum material performance, it calls 
out a maximum of moral resource. As long as guns 
and bayonets have men behind them, the quality of 
the men, the quality of their minds and wills, must 
be counted with the power of the weapons. 

And as long as men fight in nations and armies, 
that subtle but mighty influence that passes from 
man to man, the temper and spirit of the group, 
must be counted with the quality of the individual 
citizen and soldier. Every racial group, every army 
corps, every regiment, has its own distinctive men- 
tality with which it endows its members, and for 
which it becomes reputed. And every commander 
accordingly seeks to know not alone what numbers 
are against him, but who they are. In a paper just 
now before me I see these words : 

"On one occasion prior to an attack, an intelli- 
gence officer whose duty it was to interrogate pris- 
oners gleefully remarked to me: 'I've had very 
good news; the regiments in front of our new line 
are Saxons and Bavarians.' These soldiers ad- 
mittedly do not fight as well as the Prussians." 

And in another paragraph: 

"It was said of a certain foreign contingent whom 
a Hun officer had captured that he sent them back 
to their own line with the remark, '"We can take you 
again at any time ; we have enough mouths to feed 
already,' — so little did he think of their fighting 
qualities." 



WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 5 

The story need not be taken as history; yet it is 
hardly too extreme. 

And as we have seen in the case of our own troops, 
every group of soldiers is an unknown quantity 
until it has been tried out. We had no doubt that 
American soldiers would acquit themselves well; 
but who is there that did not follow the early re- 
ports with a tense interest to know how well? What 
could the great business-loving republic do toward 
producing a fighting morale? — that was the ques- 
tion. We were aware that mentality as well as 
armament is a factor in warfare. 

But how much does this intangible, psychological 
factor count? Napoleon in his day reckoned it 
high : ' ' In war, the moral is to the physical as three 
to one." But things have changed since Napoleon's 
day. Then there was still a personal element in the 
encounter of battle; there was still some truth in 
the Eoman maxim, ' ' In battle it is the eyes that are 
first conquered." Now one may spend weeks of 
fighting and never seen an enemy— much less seen the 
soul driven from his eyes. Yet there are reasons 
for believing that the moral factor is not less im- 
portant to-day than heretofore. For consider: 

1. It is still the hand-to-hand fighting, especially 
the bayonet work, that constitutes the last argument 
of every engagement. 

''Down the ages, from the prehistoric spearman, 
through the times of the Macedonian phalanx, 



b MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

the pikeman, and the halberdier, on to the present 
day, the spear has been the deciding factor of many 
battles. And what is the bayonet but the spear of 
ancient days? At the final stage, the battle of 
to-day is as the battle of long ago : only the prelimi- 
naries are different. And of what use the best artil- 
lery preparation, of what avail the fire-supremacy 
of the finest troops, if the bayonet does not follow 
them up to make good the advantage they have 
gained?"* 

2. The quality of combat is none the less per- 
sonal because one cannot see the opponent. The 
human face is but an organ of expression which 
we have to learn to read; and any physical thing 
that can show shades of temper is capable of being 
read like a face. Thus one learns to read firing as 
one learns to know the calibers of shells by their 
whine. There is desultory firing, determined firing, 
enraged firing, nervous firing, timid firing, and 
many another variety. In this and a hundred other 
ways, battle always has its face, whether or not it is 
a human face ; and experienced men feel as directly 
when that opposing eye is conquering or being con- 
quered. 

3. Perhaps because of the longer intervals of 
waiting and tension, the spirit of the various units 
seems sensitive as never before to a thousand shades 
of feeling, sensitive as a stock-market to the rise and 
fall of confidence and good-will. Every token from 
outside, especially the orders and their bearers, are 

*Lieut. Col. Paul H. McCook, in The Infantry Journal, April, 1918, 
page 780. 



WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 7 

scanned, perhaps subconsciously, for the straws 
that show what wind is blowing. If the officer's 
stout words come from an apprehensive mind, he 
will hardly conceal the fact ; and what is outwardly 
accepted will leave an emptiness, like his own, in 
the hearts of his hearers. The fighting spirit, farther 
from pure instinct than in former days, is by so 
much more canny, sensitive, and shrewd. 

4. The strains of war on nerve and courage are 
not less but more severe than in previous wars. To 
take but a single indication, the prevalence of ' ' shell- 
shock" means not that human quality has declined, 
but that it can deliberately expose itself to more 
inhuman and longer suffering than men have ever 
before in large numbers been called on to endure. 

5. And in one way at least these mental factors 
are far more weighty than in Napoleon's day. For 
behind the army lies the nation; and the whole un- 
wieldy mass, army and nation, is much more a 
mental unit than in any previous war, each de- 
pendent on the courage and good-will of the other. 
When armies were smaller, it was not so serious a 
matter if any portion of the civil population were 
disaffected. But now, communication is prompt; 
and the communication of temper is far prompter 
than the communication of fact. It is not beyond 
credence that a strike of coal-workers in Pennsyl- 
vania might on the next day lose a battle in Flan- 
ders. Men in the field are able to know vastly more 
of the fortunes of their families than ever before 



8 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

in war; and perhaps for this reason the minor 
troubles and joys of civilian life loom larger on the 
firing-line. The entire population behind the fight- 
ers becomes a part of the fighting state of mind; 
and all shades of depression and elation pass with 
the speed of wireless messages from center to fight- 
ing frontier, and back again. 

In no war, I judge, has the human quality counted 
for so much: — ; the endurance, the initiative, the 
power of sacrifice, the loyalty, the ability to subor- 
dinate personal interest and pride, the power of 
taking the measure of the event, of discounting the 
unfavorable turn, of responding to frightfulness 
with redoubled resolution rather than with fear, 
of appreciating the real emergency and rising in- 
stantly to meet it. It is these qualities of mind and 
character which in the ensemble go by the name of 
" morale " ; and it is these qualities that hold the bal- 
ance of power in war. 

For war, completely seen, is no mere collision of 
physical forces : it is a collision of will against will. 
It is, after all, the mind and will of a nation — a 
thing intangible and invisible — that assembles the 
materials of war, the fighting forces, the ordnance, 
the whole physical array. It is this invisible thing 
that wages the war; it is this same invisible thing 
that on one side or other must admit the finish and 
so end it. As things are now, it is the element of 
"morale" that controls the outcome. 



WHY MOKALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 9 

I say, as things are now; for it is certainly not 
true as a rule of history that will-power is enough 
to win a war, even when supported by high fighting 
spirit, brains, and a good conscience. Belgium had 
all this, and yet was bound to fall before Germany 
had she stood alone. Her spirit worked miracles at 
Liege, delayed by ten days the marching program 
of the German armies, and thereby saved — perhaps 
Paris, perhaps Europe. But the day was saved be- 
cause the issue raised in Serbia and in Belgium drew 
to their side material support until their forces 
could compare with the physical advantages of the 
enemy. Morale wins, not by itself, but by turning 
scales: it has a value like the power of a minority 
or of a mobile reserve. It adds to one side or the 
other the last ounce of force which is to its oppo- 
nent the last straw that breaks its back. 

Differences in morale, however, are cumulative. 
Psychologically, as applied to armies, there is an 
obvious rough truth in the adage that nothing suc- 
ceeds like success. Depression, on the other hand, 
relaxes the grip, and so begets failure and further 
depression ; — fear reduces control and tends to grow 
toward panic. Where such gigantic numbers are 
engaged it is more nearly true than ever that an 
army which does not know itself beaten is not 
beaten: a decisive victory in the field will probably 
be preceded by a victory over morale. A general 
crumbling of confidence among the vanquished will 
usher in the debacle. 



10 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

I do not wish to convey the impression that the 
advantages in morale are all on our side. Morale 
is not identical with the morals of the case. Confi- 
dence, determination, endurance, and discipline may- 
exist in a perfectly bad cause: for four years all 
these qualities were present in the Austro-German 
command. The professional status of their armies, 
their knowledge of their own power, their early suc- 
cesses in carrying the fighting into the countries of 
their victims, — all these were heavy assets, mental 
assets, whose value has not wholly vanished. The 
officers of the British and American armies, taken 
in the large, are relatively new to their work: for 
some time they must be reckoned in the amateur 
class in comparison with the long-trained minds and 
bodies of the enemy. And this is a circumstance 
which makes itself felt all the way to the rank and 
file : for ability to rely on the experience as well as 
the sagacity of the officer is one of the prime ele- 
ments in the morale of private soldiers. We have 
advantages of our own; we need not belittle those 
of the enemy. 

The building-materials of morale must be taken 
from the general qualities of the will of a people, — 
its virility, its integrity, its spiritedness, its endur- 
ance ; and among these qualities justice is not least 
in weight. But given the materials, morale itself — 
a virtue for the occasion — requires building: it can- 
not be simply distilled from the atmosphere. 

We see, then, why it is that after providing for 



WHY MOBALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 11 

the number of fighters and their equipment there 
still remains a great question, How much fight is 
there in each one and in the mass ? And we see that 
there are always two ways to increase our fighting 
strength : by increasing the number of our units, or 
by increasing the fighting power of each unit. What- 
ever could double the morale of a million men, — if 
that were possible, — would add the equivalent of a 
million such men to the force. 

And the thing is not impossible. For the amount 
of fight per man can vary through a far wider 
range than the Napoleonic ratio of three to one. 
This is true even of the minor ups and downs of the 
daily rhythm. Ten men at their top notch of con- 
dition might easily handle a hundred similar men 
at their ebb of hunger, pain, and fatigue. And 
there are other variable elements that count quite 
as much, such as buoyancy and humor. Humor is 
a symptom of margin: a man who has it can do 
more than fight when he is fighting, — he can look 
about and find a trick to spring, with the result that 
we have sergeants who with a handful of men bring 
in a battalion of prisoners. Or he can make the 
passing misery dwindle in magnitude for an entire 
company, as with the Irish corporal in the Philip- 
pines, who, as General Shanks narrates, after a hot 
day's marching and a loss of the trail, was sent to 
the top of a ridge to reconnoitre. When a comrade 
called up, "I say, Shorty, is this the last hill?" he 



12 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

shouted back, "Yes, the last hill it is: — the next one 
is a mountain."* 

•The following episode of the great retreat in the Fall of 1914 
is one of a thousand instances of a trait of the British Tommy with 
which the war has made us familiar, — he is never quite "all in" so 
long as it is possible to find a comical angle in the situation, or 
rather, a comical route to its underlying philosophy: 

Major Tom Bridges, of the 4th Dragoon Guards, had been sent 
into St. Quentin on Friday afternoon to see if more stragglers 
could be found. In the square near the Mairie he found a couple of 
hundred or more men of various detachments, who were seated on 
the pavement in complete exhaustion and utter resignation to what 
appeared their inability to rejoin the army which had retreated far 
to the southward. . . . Bridges needed but a moment to see how 
far gone they were, how utterly and hopelessly fatigued. No per- 
emptory order, no gentle request, no clever cajolery would suffice. 
With most of them the power to move seemed to themselves to have 
gone with ceaseless tramping without food or sleep for the thirty- 
six hours past. 

A brilliant idea came to the big genial major. Entering a toy 
shop he bought a toy drum and a penny whistle. He strapped the 
little drum to his belt. 

"Can you play 'The British Grenadiers'?" he asked his trumpeter. 

"Sure, sir," was the reply. 

In a twinkling the pair were marching round the square, the 
high treble of the tiny toy whistle rising clear and shrill: 
But of all the world's brave heroes 
There's none that can compare 
With a tow, row, roio, 
With a tow, row, row, 
To the British Grenadiers. 

Round they came, the trumpeter, caught on the wings of the 
Major's enthusiasm, putting his very heart and soul into every 
inspiring note. Bridges, supplying the comic relief with the small 
sticks in his big hands, banged away on the drum like mad. 

They reached the recumbent group. They passed its tired length. 
Now they came to the last man. Will they feel the spirit of the 
straining notes, rich with the tradition of the grand old air ? Will 
they catch the spirit of the big-hearted Major, who knows so well 
just how the poor lads feel, and seeks that spot of humour in 
Tommy's make-up that has so often proved his very salvation? 

The spark has caught! Some with tears in their eyes, some with 
a roar of laughter, jump to their feet and fall in. Stiffened limbs 
answer to call of newly awakened wills. "With a tow, row, row, to 
the British Grenadiers." They are singing it now, as they file in 
long column down the street after the big form hammering the toy 
drum, and his panting trumpeter. 

"Go on, Colonel. We'll follow you to hell," sings out a brawny 
Irishman behind, who can just hobble along on his torn feet. 

Never a man of all the lot was left behind. — Frederic Coleman, 
From Mom to Ypres, page 65. 



WHY MOKALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 13 

But beneath these minor variations are the funda- 
mental differences in the set of the will, the long- 
time qualities that make the tenacious and unde- 
featable fighting man or the reverse. 

The most important distinction affecting morale 
among our people, in or out of the army, is not that 
between the loyal and disloyal, but that between the 
whole-hearted and the half-hearted or three-quar- 
ters-hearted, — those who are in the war, but with 
reservations conscious or unconscious, with insuffi- 
cient, cloudy, dazed, or socially-fabricated motive 
power, not enough to carry them well over the 
threshold into the new and harsher outlook on their 
own fortunes and personalities that war requires, 
somewhere shrinking and unreconciled, — in brief, 
with inadequate foundation for the lasting elements 
of morale. It is this foundation that we have es- 
pecial need to understand. 



CHAPTER II 

WHAT IB A GOOD MOBALE? 

Perhaps the simplest way of explaining the mean- 
ing of morale is to say that what " condition" is to 
the athlete's body, morale is to the mind. Morale 
is condition; good morale is good condition of the 
inner man: it is the state of will in which you can 
get most from the machinery, deliver blows with 
the greatest effect, take blows with the least de- 
pression, and hold out for the longest time. It is 
both fighting-power and staying-power and strength 
to resist the mental infections which fear, discour- 
agement, and fatigue bring with them, such as 
eagerness for any kind of peace if only it gives mo- 
mentary relief, or the irritability that sees large 
the defects in one's own side until they seem more 
important than the need of defeating the enemy. 
And it is the perpetual ability to come back. 

From this it follows that good morale is not the 
same as good spirits or enthusiasm. It is anything 
but the cheerful optimism of early morning, or the 
tendency to be jubilant at every victory. It has 
nothing in common with the emotionalism dwelt on 
by psychologists of the ' ' crowd. " It is hardly to be 
discovered in the early stages of war. Its most 

14 



WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 15 

searching test is found in the question, How does 
war- weariness affect yout 

No one going from America to Europe in the last 
year could fail to notice the wide difference between 
the mind of nations long at war and that of a nation 
just entering. Over there, " crowd psychology" 
had spent itself. There was little flag-waving; the 
common purveyors of music were not everywhere 
playing (or allowed to play) the national airs. If 
in some Parisian cinema the Marseillaise was given, 
nobody stood or sang. The reports of atrocities 
roused little visible anger or even talk, — they were 
taken for granted. In short, the simpler emotions 
had been worn out, — or rather, had resolved them 
selves into clear connections between knowledge and 
action. The people had found the mental gait that 
can be held indefinitely. Even a great advance finds 
them on their guard against too much joy. As the 
news from the second victory of the Marne begins 
to come in, we find this despatch : 

"Paris refrains from exultation." 

And in the trenches the same is true in even 
greater degree. All the bravado and illusion of war 
are gone, also all the nervous revulsion ; and in their 
places a grimly reliable resource of energy held in 
instant, almost mechanical readiness to do what is 
necessary. The hazards which it is useless to spec- 
ulate about, the miseries, delays, tediums, casualties, 
have lost their exclamatory value and have fallen 
into the sullen routine of the day's work. Here it is 



16 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

that morale begins to show in its more vital dimen- 
sions. Here the substantial differences between man 
and man, and between side and side, begin to appear 
as they can never appear in training camp. 

Fitness and readiness to act, the positive element 
in morale, is a matter not of good and bad alone, 
but of degree. Persistence, courage, energy, initia- 
tive, may vary from zero upward without limit. 
Perhaps the most important dividing line — one that 
has already shown itself at various critical points — 
is that between the willingness to defend and the 
willingness to attack, between the defensive and the 
aggressive mentality. It is the difference between 
docility and enterprise, between a faith at second 
hand dependent on neighbor or leader, and a faith 
at first hand capable of assuming for itself the posi- 
tion of leadership. 

In any large group of men there is bound to be 
a certain amount of psychological "filling," i.e., 
minds that go on momentum and suggestion rather 
than on conviction of their own. There are men 
who find themselves in the army through a series 
of events of which they have had no control, and 
who go on because they cannot go back. In all 
armies of the old regime much depended on this 
principle : ' ' Get men into it anyhow, circumstances 
will keep them there, and self-preservative impulses 
will make them fight. ' ' There is a degree of human 
nature in this : men can be counted on to exert them- 
selves mightily to get out of a mortal scrape, no 



WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 17 

matter what got them into it. But such spirit is 
visibly poor stuff to make war with, liable to panic, 
unable to replace lost leaders, wholly undemocratic 
in principle, and the less of it we have in either army 
or nation, the better. The morale that counts is the 
morale that would make war of itself alone and 
therefore tugs at the leash. 

But readiness to wait, the negative element in 
morale, is as important as readiness to act, and 
oftentimes it is a harder virtue. Patience, espe- 
cially under conditions of ignorance of what may be 
brewing, is a torment for active and critical minds 
such as this people is made of. Yet impetuosity, 
exceeding of orders, unwillingness to retreat when 
the general situation demands it, are signs not of 
good morale but the reverse. They are signs that 
one's heart cannot be kept up except by the flatter- 
ing stimulus of always going forward, — a state of 
mind that may cause a commanding officer serious 
embarrassment, even to making impossible decisive 
strokes of strategy.* 

The quality of morale is not capable of being 
tested by the methods of the psychological labora- 
tory. There are many mental tests which can be 

*During the retreat to the Marne in the Fall of 1914, it was neces- 
sary that all parts of the line should move back together. It would 
have played well into the German plan for any fragment of the 
line to hold a local advantage, lose contact with units on its flank, 
and so make an opportunity of the sort which was later used so 
brilliantly against themselves. The feeling of British soldiers here 
and there toward the necessity of retreat is thus described by Wil- 
son McNair: 

"How our men hated this retreating! Again and again I heard 
from their lips angry and amazed comments upon the action of their 
leaders. The men seemed to feel that they had a special grievance 



18 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

used, and are used, to distinguish the promising 
soldier from the unpromising, but the critical ele- 
ments of morale elude them. The difference be- 
tween one man and another is largely a different 
in staying-power : staying-power cannot be tested in 
the laboratory, except in minor ways. The whole 
outcome of a battle or of a campaign may depend 
on what a few men will do when their "backs are 
to the wall": but the situation of being at bay can- 
not be reproduced in the testing-room in any serious 
way. Still more elusive is the power men have of 
taking fire under the influence of strong leaders: 
any man's worth may be multiplied tenfold under 
the magic of great leadership. But no investigation 
of the solitary human being under the highly un- 
inspiring environment of the testing-room could 
detect the degree of his kindling capacity. 

Yet the quality of morale is something that can 
be instantly felt by anyone who knows its signs, 
large and small. How does a platoon react to an 
extra detail, or a battalion to an unexplained delay 
in relief? How does a people respond to the hun- 
dred exceptional demands of war time? Their 
temper may be seen in the speed of volunteering, in 
the way they accept the harder requirement — the 
draft, in the taking of bonds and the payment of 

against leaders who, each time they 'won a battle' ordered them to 
run away. But with characteristic esprit de corps they blamed the 
French commanders rather than their own. It was a French idea, 
this retreating, they said, and it was a d — d bad idea. Their opinion 
of the French commanders went down to zero during those days, 
even as it was to leap up again in the great days after the battle of 
the Marne." — Blood and Iron, page 194. 



WHAT IS A GOOD MOEALE? 19 

extra taxes, in the result of appeals for voluntary 
self-restraint in small comforts, in the disposition to 
overcome internal disagreements, in the sale of 
news, the attitude toward hindrances in the path of 
war work, the pressure for results upon the men in 
office, and not least in significance, the clear-headed 
fairness of judgment toward these men, and the 
readiness to make allowances for mistake in situa- 
tions where no human foresight can wholly avoid 
error. 

But there are slighter signs that tell as large a 
story. They are the signs of sentiment, or the kind 
of response that is made to an occasion when the 
sources of feeling are tapped. That was a shrewd 
method of the German agents in Alsace who, to 
test the loyalty of doubtful citizens during the early 
months of the war, went about asking them what 
they thought of the " glorious victories." Enthu- 
siasm or the want of it might tell the tale that pru- 
dent lips kept concealed. The moments of the ex- 
pression of sentiment are the most vulnerable mo- 
ments for any leader. They either carry or alienate 
the people, and if the morale is at low ebb it is at 
these points that disturbance is most likely to take 
place, just as the unpopular actor is in most danger 
of being hooted at the moment of his would-be- 
affecting passage. Of the temper of Russia, we 
are told that "The Bolshevists no longer dare to 
arrange demonstrations of their own." In some of 
the invaded districts, the German officers exact 



20 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

salutes from the men, — and also from the women:* 
it has been reported that they exact also that 
these salutes shall be given with deference and 
alacrity. Why with " deference and alacrity"? Be- 
cause these are the signs of morale. The spirit 
speaks more in the manner of the salute than in the 
fact; and these officers seem to believe that in com- 
manding the manner they succeed in some violent 
way in forcing the soul. And no doubt they suc- 
ceed in torturing the soul in that way, because in 
any act done under command the manner of doing it 
is the natural refuge of freedom. Morale is seen 
in the spirit which is put into obedience, the evident 
free will with which one adds the touch of briskness 
and grace to what is required of him. 

In this way, even the rigidity of army life may 
become the frame for the visible liberty of freedom- 
loving men. However far the orders go, there is 
always the last touch that cannot be commanded, 
but can only be given. All the difference between 
effective and ineffective war-making lies in the suc- 

*From a proclamation of September 8, 1914, at Grivegnee, 
Belgium : 

I must insist that all civilians who move about in my district, 
particularly those of Beyne-Hensay, Fteron, Bois de Breux, and 
Grivegnee, show their respect to the German officers by taking off 
their hats, or lifting their hands to their heads in military salute. 

In case of doubt, every German soldier must be saluted. Any 
one who disregards this must expect the military to make them- 
selves respected by any means. 

( Signed ) DiECKMANN. 

The same principle is implied in a verdict at Bruges reported by 
Mr. Walter Duranty, October 21, 1918: "One English woman 
was fined 300 marks or a week's imprisonment for 'wearing an anti- 
German expression in the official Bureau,' the very words of the 
condemnation notice." 



WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 21 

cess of government or command in enlisting this free 
contribution of the man to his denned duty. 

But perhaps the best indication of a good morale 
is the liberty felt by officials of all grades to tell the 
truth, both as to the difficulties of the task ahead, 
and as to the failures that attend its course. 

When we see the high command of Germany re- 
ferring to a Marne retreat as the taking of "new 
positions," we can read under the ambiguous accu- 
racy of the phrase a fear of their own public morale. 
Statesmen of other lands have been known to mod- 
ify what they felt to be a bitter dose; and usually 
it has been the morale of the statesman rather than 
that of the public which has been at fault. Prudent 
statesmen and censors might learn much from the 
fact that when the news of the disaster to the Brit- 
ish fifth army on the days succeeding March 21st 
(1918) began to roll in, recruiting both in England 
and in Canada took a sudden upward leap. The 
human mind, always apprehensive and trying to 
decipher the future, doubly so in time of great con- 
tingency such as war brings, is chiefly fearful of 
being protected from the truth. 

For the tempering of the truth is the first sign 
of an attempt to manipulate morale from the ex- 
terior; and whatever is recognized as having this 
aim immediately, and by that fact, becomes suspect. 
Any agency professing to assist morale, any occa- 
sion gotten up for the sake of rallying a shaken 
or sleepy morale, will partially (I do not say wholly) 



22 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

defeat its own purpose. It establishes at once a 
state of guard and scrutiny on the part of its in- 
tended beneficiaries. For as a state of the will of 
free men, morale can only be evolved by the man 
himself, his own reaction to his own data. It has 
been the fundamental error of Germany to suppose 
that the soul can be controlled by scientific manage- 
ment. 

In fact, the better the morale, the more profound 
its mystery from the utilitarian angle of judgment. 
There is something miraculous in the power of a 
bald and unhesitating announcement of reverse to 
steel the temper of men attuned to making sacri- 
fices and to meeting emergencies. No one can touch 
the deepest moral resources of an army or nation 
who does not know the fairly regal exaltation with 
which it is possible for men to face an issue — if 
they believe in it. There are times when men seem 
to have an appetite for suffering, when — to judge 
from their own demeanor — the best bait fortune 
could offer them is the chance to face death or 
to bear an inhuman load. This state of mind does 
not exist of itself: it is morale at its best, and it 
appears only when the occasion strikes a nerve 
which arouses the super-earthly vistas of human 
consciousness or subconsciousness. But it com- 
monly appears at the summons of a leader who 
himself welcomes the challenge of the task he sets 
before his followers. It is the magic of King Alfred 
in his appeal to his chiefs to do battle with the 



WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE ? 23 

Danes, when all that he could hold out to them was 
the prospect of his own vision, — 

"This — that the sky grows darker yet 
And the sea rises higher." 

Morale, for all the greater purposes of war, is a 
state of faith; and its logic will be the superb and 
elusive logic of human faith. It is for this reason 
that morale, while not identical with the righteous- 
ness of the cause, can never reach its height unless 
the aim of the war can be held intact in the undis- 
sembled moral sense of the people. This is one of 
the provisions in the deeper order of things for the 
slow predominance of the better brands of justice. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE, INSTINCTS AND 

FEELINGS 

The call to war strikes straight for the deeper 
reservoirs of active energy, sets every nerve agog, 
and summons up a response greater than we can 
bring to ordinary tasks. It is charged with pre- 
monition, and yet strangely also with reminiscence, 
as if the fire of warriors long dead were once more 
burning in our common and sluggish veins. How- 
ever much the rational and kindly part of us abhors 
war, something in us welcomes it: for nature has 
not left us unfitted for the ardors of combat and 
radical adventure. Whatever it brings, war always 
brings "The Day," — the day never planned, yet 
never dropped from subconscious hope, — the great 
occasion to which we may give ourselves soul and 
body, without reserve. In the universal unsettle- 
ment all things have become possible ; half the work 
of overcoming the dull resistance to change is done 
for us by the event ; the world has suddenly become 
vastly worth living in. In every heart still pos- 
sessed of youth, war calls out a resonant and fathom- 
less "I can." And the aged, called on to take up 
again the work of their vigorous years, find them- 
selves, almost beyond belief, able. 

24 



INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 25 

All this, however sobered by second thought, 
means that the occasion of war excites instincts 
deep-laid in human nature. Even in common anger, 
one may find himself trembling under the pulses of 
an inward engine whose presence he hardly guessed: 
the spring of the fighting-instinct has been touched. 
But the anger of a nation called to war is no com- 
mon anger. The fighting-instinct is coupled with 
another, the instinct of the herd. A new and far- 
flung fraternity is in the air : for there is the haunt- 
ing knowledge that the herd is in motion, is attack- 
ing or being attacked,— and if attacking, then being 
attacked, — in any case, then, in danger. To know 
that is enough. The neighbor is no longer the in- 
different mortal he was yesterday : he belongs with 
us to the tribe, the nation. "The nation"? — the 
word has changed its meaning, and instead of call- 
ing to mind a dullish governmental agency, source 
of mixed good and evil and regarded accordingly, 
it now evokes a vague but glorious image, object of 
an unwonted, generous, protective pride. Because 
of "her," that primitive sense of allegiance spring- 
ing from the instinct of the herd takes the finer 
form of what men call patriotism; and many a 
man's superficial rationality has been taken by sur- 
prise at the depth of its hold upon him. 

This tribal sense, identical in both soldier and 
civilian, makes the permanent background of feel- 
ing much the same in both, though the active kill- 
ing deed, and the physical fighting rage that go 



26 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

with it, come to the soldier only. When the civilian 
says "We must fight on," the full stretch of his 
thought reaches the soldier and means, "You must 
kill on." And when the soldier says, "We are at- 
tacking to-morrow," his thought sweeps into its 
dim borders the homes and workshops of a nation 
and means, "America is attacking to-morrow." 

All the experiences of war are governed by this 
curious and immense extension of personality. 
Hence the durable pugnacity of war is seldom ex- 
plosive like that of common anger : it has a sterner 
and weightier as well as a longer task; its set is 
deeper and its breathing more deliberate. Even our 
instincts are aware that war is a relation not be- 
tween persons but between States. They are little 
confused by the fact — sometimes, as in Tolstoi's 
case, disturbing to reflection — that the men engaged 
in killing one another are not personal foes. The 
fighting-instinct understands that it is in the service 
of the social instinct. And not uncommonly the 
feeling of crowd-loyalty, together with the equally 
instinctive love of adventure, quite submerge the 
sense of hostility or resentment. 

However, a sound and lasting morale cannot exist 
unless both soldier and citizen feel that the action 
of the enemy touches them individually, no matter 
through how many intermediate links. "Tell that 
to the marines" is the legend of Mr. Flagg's well- 
known poster, showing a contemporary knight an- 
grily shedding his coat at a tale of violence or de- 



INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 27 

pravity across several thousand miles of land and 
sea. Learned men sometimes argue whether States 
are subject to the same moral rules that affect per- 
sons : yet as a matter of plain psychology, nothing 
is more evident than that the war-spirit in any na- 
tion depends on regarding the deeds of the enemy 
State as threatening, inhuman, treacherous, arro- 
gant, or otherwise intolerable, in just the same way 
that personal deeds may be : they must touch in the 
same way the same springs of resentment in each 
of the millions of bodies of the people. Polite diplo- 
matic crimes, however menacing, seldom stir public 
wrath until they are embodied in some personal 
outrage that can stand as their concrete symbol. 
The psychological laws of morale are therefore first 
of all the laws of personal pugnacity. 

Pugnacity is one of two or three ways of meeting 
an obstacle. The easiest way is to give up, go 
around, or retreat; pugnacity is a way of added 
effort. It can only exist where there are reserves 
of energy to be called on: a completely exhausted 
person is incapable of wrath. In fact, pugnacity is 
probably developed by nature originally as a sort of 
moble reserve for coming to the aid of other instincts 
when in difficulty. It may take a very mild form, 
as in the extra effort one puts into opening a stub- 
born door. There is a tell-tale warmth, in some 
persons what we might call a "threshold of pro- 
fanity," which marks the fact that the reserves are 



28 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

beginning to arrive. Or, as one of the two typical 
passions of human nature, it may rise to the level 
of transport. But throughout the gamut we can 
see that it means new energy put behind the purpose 
in hand; that the bodily disturbance is intended to 
fit the organism for strong and sustained exertion. 

In human beings, pugnacity always personifies 
its object, even to the point of apostrophizing the 
unruly door. This reaction is not always scientific; 
and experience, in the case of inanimate things, 
gradually substitutes a more inquiring mind, while 
retaining the pugnacity in the form of mettle or 
spirit. But where the obstacle is personal, there 
remains a place for indignation. That is, where 
all the means of persuasion have failed, and the de- 
liberate bad will is a fact in the world which we 
must face and meet. The change from normal to 
hostile relations is usually slow, reluctant, and the 
result of a cumulation of events ; for it is not simply 
a change of behavior, but a change of the entire 
system of assumptions, ideas, and hopes under 
which relations are carried on. We hope against 
hope for a time; we launch an ultimatum; then we 
cast the die, the word of breach is uttered, and 
"what worlds away." 

In such cases we can see that pugnacity, first of 
all, must be certain of itself, certain both of its 
facts and of its cause. There is no surer way to 
deflate an angry man than to show a material flaw 
in his premises. And, second, pugnacity always 



INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 29 

requires a moral motive, though its occasion is ma- 
terial. It lights not on the property that is taken, 
but on the theft in the taking. It always adopts 
the language "You ought.' ' 

Beasts and children will fight for what they want 
simply because they want it, without compunction 
on the score of ' ' right. ' ' Mature men seldom achieve 
this sublime inconsiderateness. The most unblush- 
ing robber in face of his victim feels a pressure to 
make it appear that his rights have somehow been 
invaded, by society if not by the individual: the 
wolf tries the lamb and finds him guilty. 

Reflective and experienced culprits, it is true, 
weary in time of the burdensome hypocrisy and 
throw off the mask. But it is clear that the leaders 
of Germany could have won the nation to war 
neither in 1870 nor now without a plausible show 
that their war was a war of defense. And as the 
facts gradually oust the now well-rooted falsehood, 
the will to war of the Central Powers weakens, and 
would weaken faster but for the dread that the 
wrath of the world may indeed make their fight now 
one for national existence. 

Thus indignation in mature human beings always 
assumes the garb of moral indignation; and this 
implies that the normal exercise of the fighting- 
instinct is in the interest of justice, and against 
a being capable of seeing moral distinctions. Stupid- 
ity itself would not provoke impatience except for 



30 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

the assumption that humanity — and animals — ought 
not to be stupid, and that they know it. 

And it should be added that as a form of passion, 
anger is frequently a highly self-forgetful and gen- 
erous experience. As a radical state of will, it abol- 
ishes petty considerations, ceases the effort to save 
remnants of amenity and advantage, casts prudence 
to the winds and makes a clean sweep. It frequently 
assumes great risks and much exertion which a pru- 
dent neutrality or compromise could avoid. As be- 
tween the man who has a capacity for wrath, and a 
man incapable of any radical passion, few would 
hesitate to choose the former. 

But anger is noble only in the noble; and as a 
personal explosion it always bears the trace of the 
failure it signalizes. The serving of ultimata is not 
good building material for social life. And the same 
must be said of the pugnacious attitude toward 
other nations : it is in each case a last resort and a 
confession of "mortal mind," at some time in the 
past if not at the moment. Yet if the failure exists 
it is far more honorable to confess it, and fight — 
if it is justice one is fighting for — than to maintain 
a guilty amiability. And when in the event of war 
pugnacity is combined with the social feelings and 
their instinctive loyalties, it may acquire an almost 
religious dignity. 

For, in the first place, the sense of certainty 
necessary to pugnacity is confirmed by social au- 



INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 31 

thority and suggestion. The man who fights his 
own personal battles assumes a great burden of 
assurance: but he who fights in company with his 
community may read his own conviction in the eyes 
of his neighbors on every hand. His critical faculty 
is disarmed by the momentum of common consent; 
he begins to believe in his cause with an apostolic 
fervor. 

And as to the moral ingredient necessary to the 
fighting spirit in responsible men, any cause which 
one serves in common with others will have the be- 
ginning of a moral sanction just because it is a 
common cause. The genuine devotion one gives to 
the community, the loyalty, the labor and the sacri- 
fice, lend their color to the cause itself. Psychologi- 
cally, it is easy for us mortals to invert the true 
order of dependence and believe a cause good be- 
cause we unselfishly sacrifice for it, rather than 
sacrifice for it because we have found it good. The 
herd-impulse tends of itself, automatically, to sanc- 
tion and sustain the fighting-impulse. 

And in fact, the elevation of spirit that comes of 
yielding to the social instinct is not unreal. Whether 
for good cause or ill, war demands courage and a 
proffering of the ultimate sacrifice. It develops a 
brotherhood in the ranks and a compactness in the 
national life which are substantial gains. It may 
lead many a mind into a new breadth and generosity 
of aim. The discovery of the smallness of private 
concerns, and the vitality of that public interest 



32 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

that had seemed so theoretical, — more than this, 
the actual sense of malaise and lostness if one is 
not palpably in the harness of the common task r — 
all this amounts to a revaluing of existence and 
perhaps the opening of a new chapter in personal 
development. 

More than once I have heard it said among our- 
selves that any cause which men are willing to die 
for deserves respect. It would be truer to the 
psychology of the case to say that any willingness 
to die for a cause deserves respect; but no respect 
is due to the willingness to let this virtue excuse 
the failure to examine the cause. One who is con- 
scious of making a moral investment in his coun- 
try's cause, and has filled his ears with the authori- 
tative identifications of patriotism with duty and 
religion, has no doubt a powerful invitation to neg- 
lect or slight the inquiry into the outlying issues 
whose character gives the sign of plus or minus to 
the whole affair. But just this appearance of suffi- 
cient sanction which the emotions and virtues of 
herd-feeling cast over all war-making is the chief 
mischief of crowd-psychology. When pugnacity is 
combined with patriotism it may, as we have said, 
acquire almost religious dignity; but whether or 
not it does acquire that dignity depends on some- 
thing beyond the limit of feeling or instinct. And 
without this something beyond, feeling and instinct 
are not a fit foundation for a lasting morale: the 
false appearance of worth is the worst enemy of 
real worth. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE, — KNOWLEDGE AND 

BELIEF 

One who has yielded himself to the impulse of the 
crowd, at a game, or a rally, or in the tide of war- 
feeling, may shortly come to realize that he has be- 
come less of a thinker, that he has surrendered some- 
thing of his mind as well as of his will to the keep- 
ing of the mass. He imitates more than usual, is 
more credulous, and (as if subconsciously aware of 
a certain weakness of root) more anxiously on the 
lookout for leaders to follow. At the same time, he 
is inclined to be fickle in passing from one to the 
other because the accustomed ground of judgment 
is lacking. Under the influence of crowd-feeling, 
one can be suspicious without being discriminating, 
panicky without being progressive, dogmatic with- 
out being convinced. In short, the new development 
of one's social nature has been purchased at some 
cost : one may have surrendered too much. 

Is it not obvious that a morale dependent pri- 
marily upon the instinctive impulses of pugnacity 
and national feeling must lack something vital, if 
only for this reason, — that in the order of nature, 
these impulses themselves depend upon something 
else? They are only called into existence by their 

33 



34 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

appropriate "stimulus," — i.e., some condition or 
fact in the world which arouses indignation and the 
defensive concentration of herd-feeling. Thus feel- 
ing normally results from what we know or believe ; 
if belief, as sometimes happens, is generated by the 
feeling, the natural order is inverted. 

It would be needless to dwell on this point, were 
it not so easy to ignore it in practice, and were it 
not for the fact that much current psychology in 
effect denies it. 

There are still officers in army and navy — not 
as many as formerly — who believe exclusively in 
the morale that works its way into every body 
of recruits through discipline and the sway of 
esprit de corps. "They know that they're here to 
can the Kaiser, and that's all they need to know," 
said one such officer to me very recently. "After 
a man has been here two months, the worst punish- 
ment you can give him is to tell him he can't go to 
France right away. The soldier is a man of action ; 
and the less thinking he does, the better. ' ' There is 
an amount of practical wisdom in this ; for the hu- 
man mind has a large capacity for adopting beliefs 
that fit the trend of its habits and feelings, and this 
trend is powerfully moulded by the unanimous direc- 
tion of an army's purpose. There is an all but 
irresistible orthodoxy within a body committed to 
a war. And the current (pragmatic) psychology 
referred to, making the intelligence a mere instru- 



KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 35 

ment of the will, would seem to sanction the maxim, 
"First decide, and then think accordingly." 

But there are two remarks to be made about this 
view. First, that in the actual creation of morale 
within an army corps much thinking is included, 
and nothing is accomplished without the consent 
of such thoughts as a man already has. Training 
does wonders in making morale, when nothing in 
the mind opposes it. Second, that the morale which 
is sufficient for purposes of training is not neces- 
sarily sufficient for the strains of the field. 
- The intrinsic weakness of "affective morale," as 
psychologists call it, is that it puts both sides on the 
same mental and moral footing: it either justifies 
our opponents as well as ourselves, or it makes both 
sides the creatures of irrational emotion. 

This fact is well illustrated in a book on the psy- 
chology of war that has had some vogue in the 
army : and the point is so important that I ask leave 
to quote from it at some length. Major Eltinge is 
regarding the army from the angle of crowd psy- 
chology, holding that "an army is a crowd with a 
common training and therefore easier to move than 
any other crowd to unanimous action." He says: 

"When it is proposed to imbue the mind of a 
crowd with ideas and beliefs — with modern social 
theories for instance — the leaders have recourse to 
different expedients. The principal of them are 
three in number and clearly defined, affirmation, 
repetition and contagion. Their action is some- 



36 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

what slow, but their effects once produced are very 
lasting. 

"Affirmation pure and simple, kept free of all 
reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means 
of making an idea enter the minds of crowds. . . . 
When an affirmation has been repeated sufficiently 
and there is unanimity in this repetition . . . what 
is called a current of opinion is formed and the 
powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. . . . 
Eeason is incapable of transforming man's opin- 
ions." 

So far we see Major Eltinge accepting the tend- 
ency of the crowd-feeling to take control of the 
mind and form its opinions, as a principle for shap- 
ing army morale. Now see the application to the 
public in general and the central issues of the war : 

"There has been a perfect flood of articles justi- 
fying the course of one or other of the contestants 
in the present great European war. Those articles 
did not come from the ignorant or those of weak 
judgment who without reason were led away by 
their emotions. They came from college professors, 
men of letters, scientists, representing the best in- 
telligence, education and reasoning power of the 
world. Yet each, his views colored by his emotions, 
reasons to the end that clearly justifies his own side. 

' ' The German people individually and as a whole 
believe that they are fighting desperately in defense 
of their liberties, — their very homes even. The 
Allies feel just as strongly that the Germans wan- 
tonly attacked them. The best minds of both sides 
are submerged by emotion. . . . 

"When the war is over, writers and historians, 
writing quietly in their studies uninfluenced by the 
emotion of the conflict, will point out reasons that 



KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 37 

never existed. They will point out aggression, 
vanity, pride, desire for self-aggrandizement or 
hope of political reward as the motive for acts that 
were prompted solely by patriotic fear for the coun- 
try," etc. 

A book could hardly go farther toward reduc- 
ing the enemy's cause and our own to the same 
moral status, thus destroying the morale of both 
army and people at its roots. Naturally, the writer 
had no such intention. He was simply misled by the 
glamor of a " crowd psychology'' which has had 
many true things to say about human nature; but 
which is so far from giving the whole truth that it 
leaves wholly out of view the central nerve of all 
earnest and long-range action, — conviction, the rea- 
soned belief of thinking men. 

Crowds are capable of doing reasonless things 
upon impulse and of adopting creeds without re- 
flection. But an army is not a crowd ; still less is a 
nation a crowd. A mob or crowd is an unorganized 
group of people governed by less than the average 
individual intelligence of its members. Armies and 
nations are groups of people so organized that they 
are controlled by an intelligence higher than the 
average. The instincts that lend, and must lend, 
their immense motive-power to the great purposes 
of war are the servants, not the masters, of that in- 
telligence. 

Man has, perhaps, but slight claim to be called 



38 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

"the reasoning animal": he is, let us say, nine- 
tenths impulse and one-tenth reason or reflection, 
but this one-tenth has the advantage of being 
cumulative. A thought to-day and another thought 
to-morrow: a doubt here, a query there, an idea 
struck out by this event or by that conversation, 
build themselves together and become the control- 
ling structure of our lives. The impressions I get 
from reading to-day's paper vanish, or seem to 
vanish. I cannot recall what I read yesterday. But 
that reading either confirmed or weakened the be- 
liefs that keep my purposes pointed in their course. 
The helm does not need to keep always moving. A 
deflection once made alters the course of the ship 
till the end of the voyage. 

Feeling taken by itself is an unreliable support of 
action, and is incapable of direct control either from 
outside or from inside. Anyone who has tried to 
train his feelings into the groove of what he is sup- 
posed to feel, or thinks he ought to feel, on the occa- 
sion let us say of a wedding, his own wedding, or a 
catastrophe, or even a death, will corroborate the 
statement. The slight feeling of shame with which 
one listens to an orator who is visibly aiming his 
appeal to feeling shows the same thing. Feeling is 
essentially free, individual, and transitory ; its func- 
tion is to make the connection between what I know 
and what I do. The connection is the important 
thing, and if it can be made without feeling it may 
be none the worse. The only justified appeal to 



KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 39 

free and intelligent beings is by way of what they 
think. What one himself feels as he tells his story 
or makes his argument will carry itself across with- 
out any separate exertion. 

The point is observed in practice by all instinctive 
leaders of men. If they have a state of will to pro- 
duce, they do not "assert and repeat" the conclusion 
they wish drawn: they state the facts which are 
their own premises, and let their hearers draw their 
own conclusions. They allow knowledge to do its 
natural work on the will. One of the most remark- 
able changes in morale that has taken place within 
our own borders is that in the lower East Side of 
New York, which between Fall of 1917 and Summer 
of 1918 practically discarded its non-patriotic inter- 
national socialism for a very genuine national loy- 
alty. The man who had more to do with that change 
than any other person was asked to explain it. He 
said, "When the Kaiser put over the treaty of 
Brest-Litovsk he automatically wiped socialism out 
of the East Side. Our work was simply to let in 
the light. ' ' In the army, there has been a high per- 
centage of desertion from units containing moun- 
taineers of east Tennessee, northern Alabama, and 
Georgia ; armed squadrons of the Eleventh Cavalry 
stationed at Fort Oglethorpe have been detailed to 
round them up. This condition has gone hand in 
hand with the isolation and ignorance of these 
mountain people; and the cavalrymen have found 
on various occasions that a campaign of enlighten- 



40 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

ment has been more effective in bringing deserters 
back to the colors than the armed man-hunt. 

"The trips of the cavalrymen after hiding men, 
many of them wearing the uniform of Uncle Sam, 
have been of the nature of educational tours among 
people whose attitude of opposition to the war and 
to the Government was based on ignorance and 
lies." 

And the same principle holds in the dealing of 
statesmen with the morale of entire peoples. Those 
who feel the immediate pressure of the emer- 
gency are frequently impatient with the demand 
for information about the causes of the war, and for 
authoritative statements of war aims. After a dis- 
cussion of certain questions of nationality, one of 
our diplomatic corps abroad said to me, "That is 
all very interesting; but the main thing now is to 
get on with the war. And the main thing for our 
people to realize is that so far we are not winning ; 
we have not yet struck the winning gait." At the 
some moment, Great Britain was issuing statements 
of her aims, and creating a "War Aims Committee" 
to carry the discussion through the island. There 
is in fact no way to "get on with the war" except 
by keeping the thoughts of the people together. 
There is no such thing, either in army or civilian 
world, as being too clear about the mental setting 
of the war ; there is no such thing except for difficul- 
ties of expression, as repeating the tale too often. 
A lover who replies to his lady's question, "I have 



KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 41 

told you once ; is that not enough ? ' ' may be logically 
defensible, but he is psychologically far astray ; and 
a people at war is in somewhat her position who is 
giving all she has. The more profoundly the feel- 
ings and the will are involved, the more insatiable 
and just is the appetite for knowledge. 

There is a time for thought, as I am sometimes 
reminded by friends in the army, and a time for 
action; the day of deliberation is past. My answer 
is: the time for thought is whenever the questions 
arise. For us as a nation, the major deliberations 
are indeed past. But the enemies of a sound morale 
arise all along the line, as the first flush of war-en- 
thusiasm gives way to the long pull. In the suc- 
ceeding chapters, I shall deal with some of these 
more prevalent impediments to morale in knowledge 
and belief, namely: 

1. A failure to realize the war itself; 

2. The inherent fickleness of the feeling of enmity; 

3. The awkward consciousness of our own imper- 
fect political righteousness ; 

4. The vague and unclear image of the ' ' State, ' ' — 
that invisible entity in whose behalf so much is 
sacrificed, — and the consequent paling of patriotism. 

We shall speak first of the difficulty, not wholly 
surmountable, of realizing the fact of war as it is. 



CHAPTER V 

ON REALIZING THE WAR 

For four years and more there has been about our 
ears the fact of war, a complex and mighty fact like 
a distant and rising storm. Yet for the greater 
number of us, and for the greater part of our waking 
day, it remains true that we only imperfectly believe 
war is really taking place. 

At a distance from the actual scene of war, the 
existence of war is discredited by nine-tenths of the 
impressions of the day's work. Where everything 
invites us to believe in the usual, the unusual can 
acquire but momentary and purely mental recogni- 
tion. The unwelcome knowledge has to make its 
way against the momentum of a lifetime 's purposes. 
We say that there is a war: but the thing that comes 
to our minds is not war — as it is. 

It is not merely habit, but the habitual and in- 
stinctive belief in our personal good-fortune that is 
at stake. We are mentally prepared for whatever 
carries our fortunes forward: we are mentally set 
against whatever threatens to put them backward. 
The most fortunate are thus the most incredulous 
of misfortune: and one of the most insidious dan- 
gers of wealth is the prepossession that no other 
estate is normal or possible for me. Wealth is es- 

42 



ON REALIZING THE WAR 43 

pecially prone to take to heart that Psalm which 
reads "A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten 
thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come 
nigh thee. ' ' And America, as a whole, has the habit 
of prosperity. 

Thus it comes about that beside the great physical 
effort of mobilization there goes another effort, — 
that of mental mobilization. And the second is as 
momentous as the first for the maximum effective 
morale. 

For the difference between a languid and a vigor- 
ous morale is just the difference between knowing 
a thing and realizing it. And "realizing" means 
seeing its dimensions and its bearings, what it 
means for the future as well as for the present, for 
my own action as well as for that of others. 

The prodigious labor of waking the country was 
a matter of getting the country to realize what was 
taking place. Our prophets of preparedness spoke 
to a largely unrealizing world. They spoke with 
emphasis enough; but emphasis does not produce 
belief. Sweat and tears on the part of prophets 
have never produced belief. The world has its taci- 
turn classifications for nervous and excited minds, 
as prophets have always found; and unfortunately 
there are ten unstable and irresponsible prophets 
for every true one. Until our prophets are better 
psychologists, their work will be largely in vain. 
And even now when the truth is upon us, and we 
desire to realize it, it is not within a simple act of 



44 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

our wills to do so. There is something elusive about 
that state of mind we call "realization" or belief. 

Whatever ' ' brings the war home to us " naturally 
moves us nearer to sensing its reality. Seeing, they 
say, is believing: the official pictures help; and the 
various concrete visible facts of soldierdom, and 
the mighty labors of a nation bestirring itself begin 
to win the day in our imaginations. Yet imagina- 
tion itself has to confess defeat : it scans the scenes 
for the thud of war ; and with the fall of the curtain 
a sense of disappointment steals over us — the heart 
of the thing has been missed. We read the letters 
and the books, we hear the speakers, and much is 
made actual and vivid ; but one thing we fail to grasp 
— the war. 

Would anything give us the reality, anything 
short of being over there and being in it 1 ? Would 
even that give us the realization of the fact? It 
may be of some use to give the answer, some use in 
appeasing that self -accusing restlessness, clamorous 
to be on the spot. It may help us to turn that good 
energy into more useful channels. 

Let me speak from my own observation at the 
British and French fronts and say that being over 
there and in the heart of the war-drama does not 
dissipate the haunting feeling of unreality. Of all 
the denizens of the war-zone, the practised war- 
correspondent probably sees the most; yet he does 
not escape this constitutional incredulity. He wins 



ON REALIZING THE WAR 45 

his stories from a landscape in which the unprac- 
tised witness sees confused movements, hears much 
noise near and remote, perceives sudden trees of 
smoke and dust sprouting full-grown from the hill- 
side and dissolving, notes thin lines of men appear- 
ing out of nowhere and dropping out of sight, — all in 
a frame of hills and clouds and woods and streams 
that stand patient and often serene while little man 
does his mightiest in the midst of them, destroy- 
ing chiefly his own work and kind. The observer 
searches for words that will stab awake his own 
spirit and that of his reader, and fails to find them. 

But realization has something to do with action. 
The observer cannot realize ; only he who takes part 
can understand what it means. The private soldier 
then, — but do you think that he escapes incredulity T 
I can assure you that he does not. I do not know 
whether he is more beset by it than others ; but he, 
too, sleeps and wakes and thinks he is still in an 
evil dream, that these things cannot be real. In 
the case of this war at least, seeing is not believing ; 
or perhaps we should put it this way: that the war 
cannot be seen. 

The war cannot be seen. The private soldier sees 
what no one else can see. He is there at the white- 
hot edge where history is being beaten into its new 
shape. He knows the event, the stream of events, 
not as one who explores it, but as one who plunges 
into it and feels the tug of the current in his own 
body. Perhaps for this very reason he feels more 



46 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

keenly the imprisonment of his mind, his ignorance 
of the wider bearings of his own movements. * The 
actor is at a disadvantage in judging the play; the 
soldier is at a similar disadvantage in judging the 
battle. In handing his will over to the control of his 
commanders, he has necessarily resigned also much 
of the knowledge required to guide that will. He 
has a vague confidence, sometimes a pathetic confi- 
dence, that what he fails to see and know someone 
sees and knows — his company commander probably, 
or at any rate the general staff, the war council, the 
high officers of the State. And even this confidence 
sometimes deserts him. 

For he has had reason to know the distance be- 
tween the human official mentality and omniscience ; 
and more than this, he knows that much of the truth 
of history lies buried with the memories of men who 
fell in carrying it out. Of many a critical action the 
true history will never be known. And as for the 
mysteries that regulate the attack or retreat or 
transfer, the inexplicable delays that beset reliefs, 
supplies, furloughs, his mind has long since ceased 
to beat at the bars of his speculative cage : a fatal- 
ism is likely to supervene which is not the fatalism 
of a divine foredestiny, but that of a mind caught 
in the mesh of a very human necessity and reduced 
to the simplicity of doing the next thing with what 
power one has.> The private soldier knows that he 
does not see the war. 

And the same must be said of the higher officers, 



ON REALIZING THE WAR 47 

so far as they fail to see what the private soldier 
sees. Step into the headquarters of the Sixth French 
Army where General Mestre is conducting the op- 
erations along the Aisne back of the Chemin des 
Dames. Around the walls hang great maps ; show- 
ing the dispositions of the German divisions and 
smaller units in much detail. From the room radi- 
ate hundreds of wires. In the immediate neighbor- 
hood an immense group of officers are occupied in 
collecting data of all kinds, with receiving reports 
and transmitting orders. Here in the midst is the 
directing mind, quiet, courteous, taking time to do 
the honors with the French formality which is so 
much a second nature that it becomes an element 
of simple grace. It is evident that the General sees 
much that was concealed from the private soldier: 
it is equally evident that just what the private sol- 
dier most intimately sees must drop out of the Gen- 
eral's direct knowledge. He must deal with regi- 
ments, brigades, divisions, armies, as units. He 
knows that the private soldier is here; but the war 
must come before him as a schematic totality. The* 
detail must be largely lost ; to the mind of a general 
the war becomes generalized. 

Mr. H. G. Wells reports a conversation with JofTre 
while Joffre was still in active service, in which that 
great soldier remarked to him about the "strange- 
ness of it all. ' ' This sense of strangeness is simply 
the confession which one meets everywhere, of a 
partial grasp of the event. The war, so far as it 



48 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

is visible at all, is the sum of a million separate 
visions that never find themselves together in one 
mind, — each one living vicariously on the imagina- 
tion of the rest. 

At times some one of these many angles brings 
home so poignantly the bearings of a pen stroke at 
Potsdam that one involuntarily exclaims, "This is 
the war." At a base-hospital, perhaps, where part 
of the crop of war is garnered; or in the running 
cemeteries interspersed with patches of rusted 
barbed wire along the road from Bapaume to Al- 
bert ; or in the Red Cross trains that pull their heavy 
burdens into Charing Cross with such clumsy ten- 
derness as railway trains can show, while the crowd 
stands silent, ready with its mute gifts of flowers. 
Here at Chauny one might have followed the wake 
of a retreating army, destroying for terror's sake 
what it could not use ; at Champier a violated ceme- 
tery, at Roye a ruined church, tell the same tale. Or 
here, at Erith, a thousand women stand all day 
stamping rivets into the cartridge belts of machine 
guns. Or in the streets of Paris, other thousands of 
black-robed women hold their heads high and proud. 
Or even farther away from the scene of warfare, in 
some quiet country spot, a thinker's eye straining 
into the future sees the passing of old social orders, 
the loss of the France or the England of yesterday : 
and for a moment one may seem to catch through his 
eyes a glimpse of the war as it is. 



ON EEALIZING THE WAE 49 

But in truth, the war is not a thing that can be 
seen; it must be thought. And if physical vision 
hinders or preoccupies the free flight of thought it 
may be the very thing that prevents the realization 
of the war. "War can be realized only through what 
is at once a concrete thing and an incentive of 
thought, a representative of something greater than 
itself, in short, through a symbol. The most vivid 
and complete sense of it may come through expe- 
riences which are no direct part of the doings of 
war, but which stand as symbols into which all our 
fragmentary impressions can be poured and fused. 

Let me picture one such experience. After a day's 
delay for reasons not vouchsafed to the public, the 
Channel boat from Havre to Southampton receives 
from the Admiralty the word to sail. Late at night, 
with a moon low in the West and a sea running high, 
it drops out of the harbor; and when the lights of 
the city have faded and only the great fitful gleam 
of the Point of France marks the land we have left, 
one becomes suddenly aware that the haze above the 
water on the starboard side is assuming shape, and 
the steamer's rail glides under a huge silent bulk 
from which one slim line of light looks down on us. 
Three such sentries we pass, tangible signs of the 
sleepless vigilance of England, ominous, silent, de- 
termined, as if emerging secretly from the world's 
subconscious integrity of purpose. They also are 
vulnerable, those great vessels, as much at the 
mercy of the terror that walketh in darkness as our- 



50 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

selves, yet throwing their resolute protection over 
us. This is war : in its grimness, its mystery, and its 
faith, — a stream of the weak giving itself to defend 
the weak, making itself for the time the passing 
body of the eternal certainty that rides over all the 
lurid contingencies of the conflict. 

The attitude of mind of audiences following film- 
pictures of the war is not without its significance. 
I have noticed what things seemed to rouse spon- 
taneous interest. It was not always the supposed 
climax of the film picture, the views of going over 
the top that cost the official photographer so much; 
nor the assault, which in the picture may have 
seemed strangely casual and quiet. But the sight 
of the boys debarking, the long columns, the end- 
lessly renewed columns, — symbol of inexhaustible 
human resources; — the sight of their escorts of 
honor, symbol of the union of peoples; — the sight 
of their form, the instant synchronous swing of the 
quick time, symbol of their spirit and condition; — 
and chief of all, the sight of Old Glory moving up 
the line, going forward into action, proud, proud 
Old Glory, — symbol of everything on earth we are 
eager to serve: this alone was irresistible. It is 
through the symbol that the mind best gropes its way 
to realization. 

But there is no final escape from the recurrent 
onset of incredulity — nor should there be. For at 
the center of this feeling is the true judgment (quite 



ON REALIZING THE WAR 51 

possibly a subconscious judgment) that this war is 
essentially an anachronism, a method of solving in- 
ternational problems now wholly out of date. It 
is too far out of accord with our political temper to 
be wholly real. The choice of it was possible only 
to minds living in a self-made haze, attitudinizing 
in mediaeval armor before the glass of their own 
conceit, and prizing as advanced what is only the 
echo of forgotten folly. It is a state of mind sup- 
ported by a false science and a materially pragmatic 
philosophy, a perverse interpretation of history and 
a morbid dramatization of dead ideals of rulership 
and empire, blind to the fact that new methods are 
already born and that the solution of public dilem- 
mas already in germ exists. America, slow to be- 
lieve and slow to act was slow largely through the 
irrepressible health of its own outlook, the good 
will that assumed not with its intellect alone but 
with its whole being that the age of war is gone. 
The incredulity of the average citizen, the incre- 
dulity of the boys in the trenches, is so far an honest 
incredulity: this war is a bad dream, a dream of 
minds bound in evil. Temporarily it is in their 
power to drag all Christendom into the vortex of 
their own delirium, but only until the common pain 
can bring about a common awakening. 

So far, we must suffer whatever disadvantage 
to morale comes of making war more or less 
awkwardly, theoretically, dutifully, reluctantly, de- 
void of the zest of Roman legionaries who adored 



52 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

both the goal and the method. This handicap, such 
as it is, we can accept, with pride and with complete 
confidence that it is compensated elsewhere. 



CHAPTER VI 

ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 

Instinct will come to the aid of a brief, intense 
angry effort; but it will do little or nothing to sus- 
tain a steady fighting temper over a long time. 
Animals can fight, some of them can conduct bat- 
tles ; but only mankind can carry on feuds and wars. 
War-making requires the moral persistence which 
only the reasoning biped can supply, not merely 
because of the complex and scientific character of 
its operations, but because there is something in- 
wardly elusive about the hostile sentiment itself. 

It is as though fighting engendered a subtle drug 
which in the course of time produced numbness to 
the original issue. We find peoples, like individuals, 
forgetting justice and flagging in the will to war 
because nature refuses to support antipathy at its 
original vigor, becomes inhospitable to the simple 
fact or relationship of enmity. Just as something 
instinctive and unmoral mixes in with the zest of 
fighting as fighting grows warm, so something 
equally unmoral mixes in with the wish to stop fight- 
ing, as the fighting drags through the seasons. 

It is well to understand, as far as we can, the 
causes of this strange treachery of the hostile feel- 
ings, mother of many a treacherous peace. 

53 



54 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

It is not hard to see some at least of the reasons 
why enmity tends to undermine its own founda- 
tions. In the first place, of all sentiments, it re- 
quires the highest degree of inner tension. Two 
opposite attitudes are combined in it, the effort to 
bring the hated object forward into clear conscious- 
ness, and the effort to expel it from consciousness, 
because it is hated. The hater is thus in a state of 
partial self-checkage : he becomes a divided and rela- 
tively unhappy object, preoccupied with what he 
wants to expel from the universe. If everybody 
loves a lover, as they say, there is an equally natu- 
ral tendency to hate the chronic hater and avoid 
him. 

As if to escape this result, healthy constitutions 
do not absorb hate into the system, but throw it off 
when it has done its destined work — that of bringing 
about a settled course of action, which has no need 
to goad itself on by ruminating over the original 
incentives. And because the state of enmity, like 
other negative feelings, is depressing (though like 
pain it may be highly stimulating to immediate 
action), there is a certain haste to get rid of it, even 
before it has worked out its natural result. Its 
sojourn in the system is like that of a disease which 
gradually summons out the forces of immunity and 
rejection. 

And further, there is a subconscious logic that 
often works against it. The enemy, in the course of 
our dealing with him, seldom fails to command some 



ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 55 

kind of respect, if only because he is our enemy and 
engages our powers and our wits. And if he has a 
fighter's honor, out of this respect may grow a 
genuine sympathy (well portrayed in Galsworthy's 
drama, "Strife") such as appears in our regard for 
the veterans and leaders of the Confederacy. When 
this happens, enmity has generated its own anti- 
dote and the spirit of warfare dies a natural death. 

By its methods of conducting the present war, 
Germany has removed all danger that our fighting 
spirit will die out from this last-named cause. But 
the primary tendency of enmity to benumb itself 
remains; and besides this, no sentiment is so ill- 
managed, when we consider its public expressions 
and the efforts of public men to arouse and sus- 
tain it. 

The slowness of our original response to the Eu- 
ropean situation was due in part to such psycho- 
logical errors on the part of our reporters and 
awakeners. They failed to allow for the fact that 
a mental constitution, naturally inhospitable to 
active enmity, will incline to place the alleged male- 
factor in the same class with other distant news- 
paper culprits or with stage-villains, semi-mythical, 
about whom nothing need be done. Belief has its 
momentum ; and we had been favorably disposed to 
Germany and the Germans. Besides, we lacked, as 
a people, the historical background, the sense of the 
deep-rooted antagonisms, the trains of gunpowder 
laid in the highways of European history, which 



56 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

could have given the original acts of war verisimili- 
tude. In brief we lacked the " motivation, ' ' we 
were not supplied with the motivation, and hence we 
could not believe the criminal as black as he was 
painted: men's eyes have to get used to this kind 
of darkness also. The portrait of the designing, 
unscrupulous, spy-setting, world-claiming, treaty- 
wrecking, humanity-spurning Germany seemed a 
partisan caricature. No doubt we were helped in 
this feeling by our own experience with party poli- 
tics and by our knowledge that the facts about Ger- 
many came chiefly via the British censor. There 
must be, we thought, another side : no modern nation 
could give itself to a policy quite so evil, so cynical, 
so quixotically pretentious. 

While this incredulity lasted, the inflooding 
stories of atrocities were received with a divided 
mind. With the rising flood of wrath against the 
perpetrators was mingled a feeling of resentment 
toward those who reported them. Later circum- 
stantial accounts of the treatment of Belgium roused 
a widespread flame of hot fury (and I confess that 
to this day in my own feelings the rape of Belgium 
outranks all the long list of Germany's crimes) ; 
but even then, uncertainty about the proportions 
of the fact stood between us and complete belief: 
both sides had not been heard ; the enemy remained 
somewhat less than a full-fledged reality. 

Our portrait makers had exceeded the rate at 
which our belief could grow, without supplying the 



ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 57 

background that could have speeded it. They also 
frequently committed the error of giving their con- 
clusions instead of their premises, their denuncia- 
tions and epithets instead of the facts on which they 
were based. And occasionally they committed, and 
still commit, the error of de-humanizing the enemy. 
It is seldom wise to call the enemy the names he fully 
deserves ; it is never wise to make him out less than 
human. For anger, as we saw, runs in the opposite 
direction : it personifies and attributes conscience to 
even inanimate things. If we de-humanize the foe 
we remove him from the reach of instinctive in- 
dignation. Let me illustrate: 

Not long ago I listened to a stirring address by a 
French lieutenant in the course of which he de- 
scribed the conduct of a Prussian officer taken pris- 
oner in the second battle of Ypres, the battle which 
has the distinction of witnessing the inaugural use in 
human warfare of poison gas. The first victims 
of this German invention were being taken back, 
contorted with agony, to the dressing stations, where 
war-seasoned surgeons stood appalled and help- 
less: seldom even in this war has there been such 
a scene of anguish and despair. The Prussian offi- 
cer, far from showing a sign of human concern, 
burst into derisive laughter. He laughed! and he 
muttered something to the effect that the British 
would soon learn what they were up against. Our 
speaker made his comment by quoting an after- 
dinner speech of Governor-General von Bissing at 



58 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

a Brussels banquet in which that officer referred 
with indignant surprise to the continued insub- 
ordination of the Belgian populace: " These Bel- 
gians, ' ' he said, ' ' are to me a psychological enigma. ' ' 
"Une enigme psychologique!", exclaimed the lieu- 
tenant, "it is Von Bissing and his like that are the 
psychological puzzle to us. What we are engaged 
in is not a war between nations : it is a war between 
species, — une guerre des especes." 

The story spoke for itself : the comment weakened 
it. For to place the enemy in a different species is 
to diminish his responsibility; whereas it is pre- 
cisely his responsibility that sustains the condemna- 
tion. 

During the latter part of August, 1917, four of 
us were being conducted through the devastated 
region about Noyon, Chauny, Roye, and Ham, by 
M. le Capitaine Jaubert. There were the murdered 
orchards, the choked and denied wells, the desolate 
acres of rubbish that a few weeks past were living 
cities, — everywhere ghastly, jagged spindles of wall 
rising like mutely weeping ghosts from formless 
heaps of dust, the bones of vanished architecture, — 
the whole wide stretch of mother earth made into a 
Babylonish desert, not by time but by human de- 
sign and toil. I waited during the long day to hear 
the justified anathema from the captain's lips. His 
sole comment was, "You see, gentlemen, there was 
no valid military excuse for this." He had said all 
that could be put into words; and he was right in 



ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 59 

leaving the rest to our own silent reaction. "What 
is not expressed is not over-expressed, nor yet under- 
expressed: it turns inward, and feeds the perma- 
nent resolve. 

Among the fighters, it is striking that so little 
time, comparatively, is spent in swapping atrocity- 
stories and in inventing fit epithets. They have a 
more effective way of expressing their judgment. 
What carries our boys over the top with a vengeance 
is not a warmed-up hate, and certainly not rum, but 
the sufficient knowledge of happenings within their 
own ken, set in the frame of their understanding of 
the purposes of Potsdam. 

It is this frame that is the important thing. That 
is the soul of the enemy. The significance of every 
act of atrocity lies in the fact that it is the fruit of a 
policy : it is a symptom, and a symbol, of the thing 
to be destroyed. This the soldier understands, and 
comes to understand more deeply with experience. 

If the reason for war lay in the personal inferi- 
ority of the enemy, it would be a blow to morale to 
find specimens of him, say among the prisoners, 
very much the same as ourselves. When one sees 
in the individual enemy an unquestionable fellow- 
being, the impulse to treat him as such comes to the 
front, and commonly drags with it the skeptical 
query, "Why have I been trying to kill this fellow! 
What is this monstrous madness of war that sets 
at one another's throats so many millions of beings 
meant by nature to be co-operators if not friends t ' ' 



60 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

One forgets that if Lucifer had not been a fellow- 
angel there could have been no such thing as a war 
in heaven. It is only on beings like ourselves (within 
limits) that war can be made — the whole question 
of war hangs not on what the opponent is, but on 
what he has chosen. 

What makes humanity is the power of the human 
being to commit himself to an idea or principle and 
to stand for it, so that the conflict of the principles 
becomes a conflict of the men who stand for them. 
My enemy is the man who is standing for what I 
am bound to regard as a bad principle ; standing for 
it, not in theory alone, but in trying to build it into 
the structure of human behavior generally. And to 
keep that false idea from getting a hold in the world, 
to exclude that bad principle means, on account of 
his choice, to exclude him. This much we shall 
always have in common with all human beings, the 
law of life, to stand or fall by the validity of our 
choices. If I make a sufficiently vital error I may 
have a chance in another life, but not in this: and 
the same holds good for him. The object of warfare 
is not to exclude individual souls from the universe : 
it is to keep their false choices from polluting the 
stream of history from which our descendants — and 
theirs — must draw their life. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PUEPOSES OF POTSDAM 

It is not our object to discuss the issues of the war : 
our work is to deal with the psychology of war- 
making. But having spoken of the purposes of Pots- 
dam as the chief element in the object of our pres- 
ent hostility, I can hardly acquit myself of sketching 
what those purposes are, especially since a certain 
light is thrown on them by the psychology of the 
peoples at war. 

There are people, like the English, who seem to 
be chary of committing themselves to denned pur- 
poses of any sort, afraid to desperation of becoming 
limited or doctrinaire by tying up to a particular 
principle or theory. Nevertheless they speak with 
no uncertain voice against the policies they reject, 
and so indirectly acknowledge allegiance to what 
we might call a vague public creed, none the less 
positive and real because they decline the trouble 
and risk of defining it. They pursue, if you like, a 
political vision which has at least this in common 
with the visio beatified of the mystics, that it is hard 
to put into words. Yet it helps to guide the decision 
of particular cases, and so gradually builds up a 
body of precedent, the common law of the British 
State in its dealings with other States. It has the 

61 



62 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

advantages and the disadvantages of its unwritten 
constitution. It forms no exception to the rule that 
history is made up of the commitments of men and 
nations to congenial ideas, commitments more or 
less experimental and competitive. 

The German people are far more inclined to com- 
mit themselves to a theory, and are less likely to be 
saved by the vaguer inner monitors (all more or 
less intuitive; such as, humor, taste, virtue, etc.) 
from the excesses of the intellect. This trait is due 
in part to their history. As late comers upon the 
scene of European culture, they have made head- 
way largely by skill in intelligent, patient analysis 
of what was already present, and by unflinching 
courage in applying their analysis in their own way. 
Confidence in the sufficiency of "science" to find 
the sure path to everything belonging to a nation's 
life, both material and spiritual, and unreserved 
commitment to the guiding ideas thus scientifically 
found, has become a national characteristic. 

Largely because of this German trait, this war is 
almost an ideal case of warfare. For the unreser- 
vedness of commitment so characteristic of their 
personal behavior is equally so of their foreign 
policy. The principle of that policy is not unknown 
or new in the world ; new only is the absence of com- 
punction with which it has been followed in all its 
consequences, and the vividness with which its 
nature has thus become evident to all (other) eyes. 
To see it in this extreme form is to reject it in 



THE PURPOSES OF POTSDAM 63 

toto. The Prussian has thus made himself the ex- 
perimental subject for all mankind; and this war 
becomes with full right the cause celebre of modern 
history. 

What, then, is this principle? Its name is Real- 
politik, the very plausible principle that States must 
be guided by "real" rather than imaginary goods 
and considerations. Its nature, however, appears 
when we understand that the "real" goods are the 
solid substances of economic advantage and prestige, 
as opposed to the purely imaginary or ideal prop- 
erties of honesty and good- will; and that the "real" 
considerations, the things that count in the world, 
are the accomplished facts, as opposed to the fanci- 
ful and quickly forgotten interest in the methods by 
which facts are brought about. Realpolitik is an 
easy and quite natural generalization from human 
history, when read with a cynical eye. And the pur- 
poses of Potsdam are simply the resolute embodi- 
ment of Realpolitik in international affairs. It is 
this — and not any principle of the internal organi- 
zation of States, whether autocratic or democratic 
— that we have to meet and overthrow. It is the 
principle — paradoxical enough, when we look closely 
— that just in the great affairs of inter-state rela- 
tions, principles do not count. 

And quite consistently, this implies that for all 
Germans the changing of the facts of the world 
nearer to the interests of the German State is the 
one real and valid end which justifies, nay, makes a 



64 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

duty of, every means which will work toward it : and 
that inasmuch as it can hardly be expected that 
other nations will accept this end, they may as well 
be treated as enemies, without compunction or argu- 
ment, when the day comes to assert the German will. 
It is a part of the principle that in the long run 
force is what must command the outcome : and that 
a sufficiently powerful State can quite well afford to 
make its nest in the midst of a world of cowed and 
indignant enemies, certain that it controls the fear 
if not the respect of the rest of mankind. 

During the period of the Belgian deportations, in 
the winter 1916-1917, I had a long conversation on 
the subject with a conspicuous representative of 
Germanism in this country, since deceased. I ex- 
pressed my belief that quite apart from the ques- 
tion whether Germany had the power to do as she 
liked with the Belgians, she could ill afford to defy 
the common judgment of neutral nations. He re- 
plied (and I think I recall his exact words), "We 
have about come to the conclusion that the opinion 
of neutral nations is not worth considering." 

I still doubt whether he, or the German Govern- 
ment, had weighed the cost of attracting the atten- 
tion of the world to its worst qualities. Every 
nation, like every person, has its defects : for which, 
under ordinary circumstances, it needs, and re- 
ceives, the indulgence of neighborly good-will. To 
break these usual relations deliberately not alone 
dares to dispense with this indulgence: but, since 



THE PURPOSES OF POTSDAM 65 

enmity is selective, such an act invites the foe and 
all history to judge the offending people and state 
by its evil sides primarily. Nothing human is so 
good that it can brave out this verdict in cold 
blood. The opinion of posterity, never before so 
consciously defied as by the Germanic powers in the 
making and the conduct of this war, is still greater 
than the greatest political force. 

Frederick the Great boasted that he could always 
find some pedant to justify what he had done. He 
was quite right in thinking that he could always 
find some one to try it. But history has a long, 
shrewd look at the works of men, and Frederick 
and his boast are to-day on no pedestal outside of 
Germany, and probably not within. For the chief 
danger in defying "neutral" opinion, is that it is 
the opinion of one's own soul, as it becomes clear. 
The contempt of history's judgment is the wholly 
futile and pitiful pose of despising one's own con- 
science. The deeds of Germany have condemned 
Germans of these and later times to an unmeasured 
moral suffering, which will be none the less real for 
all the Tendenzschriften of their more obsequious 
scholarship. 

Internationalism had been on a precarious foot- 
ing prior to this war : it was never known whether a 
public crime in one part of the world would or would 
not concern remoter parts. The theory of interven- 
tion was closely restricted. Germany nourished the 



66 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

ideal of unconcern, the localization of interest, the 
non-existence of a genuine international moral sub- 
stance. She built her plans on the weakness of a 
world conscience. We hesitated long: at last we 
cast the die which meant that the world's business 
is our business now and henceforth: we acknowl- 
edged ourselves co-responsible with others for the 
peace and order and justice of the planet. We re- 
fused any longer to ask the murderer's question, 
Am I my brother's keeper? With that decision, the 
cause of Germany was lost; for with that decision 
the world-community became a fact. This earth 
has consciously started up the long path of a mutual 
effort for a universal justice. 

This is the aim of the war : this is the frame within 
which all the special acts of our enemy can be placed 
and understood. The striking arm of the American 
soldier or of the American nation cannot be nerved 
for its long task by any less conception of its mean- 
ing. It is a cause whose motive has no need to feed 
on personal hatred; for it cannot be broken or dis- 
turbed by any discoveries of personal worth in its 
avowed foes. H Strike for your altars and your 
fires" was the ancient motive of tribal battles. Now 
it is "Strike for the altar of a new-born human hope, 
— the common guardianship of a common right." 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 

When the issue of a fight is simply "which of us two 
is the better man" it has the advantage of provok- 
ing no inner haltings. If the issue of war is simply 
Greek versus Persian, it has the same clean-cutness : 
everything you want to defeat is on one side, every- 
thing you want to have win is on the other. That is 
one good reason why those who are doing the fight- 
ing find a simple sign for the whole practical issue : 
it is Ourselves versus the Kaiser. There are no 
shades of virtue or vice to be measured : there is no 
problem of apportioning the guilt in the origin of 
the contest, two-thirds to one side, one-third to the 
other. The Kaiser is a concrete fact, and for pres- 
ent purposes all of a piece : his one salient attribute 
is that he is our enemy and must be beaten. 

But the moment an issue is stated in general 
terms, as Law versus Realpolitik, or Autocracy ver- 
sus Democracy, the line of cleavage refuses to local- 
ize itself strictly and exclusively in ''No Man's 
Land." There are remnants of Realpolitik, and of 
the autocratic principle, in our own public life : the 
beam may be this time in the enemy 's eye, but there 
is a good-sized mote in our own. A sense of imper- 
fect rectitude on the point in question may steal in 

67 



68 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

and confuse or hamper the good-will to strike. 
"First," one is prone to reflect, all subconsciously 
perhaps, — "First, we should clean our own house; 
and then, being above reproach, we can go whole- 
heartedly for the enemy." 

The enemy, furthermore, is not slow to take ad- 
vantage of these subcurrents which subtly lame the 
strength of the fighting arm. Fighting for democ- 
racy, are we: then what of the monarchs and em- 
perors on our side? Has any enthusastic applause 
for the great phrase of President Wilson come from 
Japan? Or if the emphasis of our principle is put 
on the liberties of small nations, we shall be ques- 
tioned about the status of Ireland and of Greece 
within the coalition. One may find good answers to 
all these questions ; but meantime the question itself 
has done its work; it has deducted something from 
the complete conviction behind the blow. No doubt 
a thinking army and nation are better for fighting 
purposes than a non-thinking army and nation ; but 
the risks to morale of stating the issues in terms of 
principles, instead of in terms of peoples, is very 
actual. There is no escape from the inner reaction 
of the principles against ourselves. 

I am speaking for the moment as though we had 
a choice whether to state our own war issue as a 
matter of principle or not. Issues undergo a gradual 
change of character as wars wear on, and it is con- 
ceivably possible to yield to the psychological drift 
toward primeval simplicity, until the war become 



THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 69 

to our minds a straggle between races. One of the 
reproaches held against American critics of Ger- 
many in the early months of the war by German 
sympathizers in America was that these critics tried 
to make the war appear a moral issue. ' ' This is not 
a moral question : it is an inevitable conflict between 
expanding races. We do not blame Eussia that it 
grows and wishes to expand southward ; neither are 
we Germans to blame that we grow and need to ex- 
pand eastward. This clash of nations due to the 
natural forces of expansion is one of the great 
tragedies of history; but there is nothing for it 
except to fight it out. It is the struggle for sur- 
vival, not a question of right and wrong." So I 
have been personally assured; so we have all been 
assured. And so we might conceivably regard the 
present alignment as the inevitable clash between 
expanding Germany and the rest of the world threat- 
ened by her ambitions. ' ' Has not Germany as good 
a formal right to an empire as Great Britain ?" 
I asked of an Englishman who had just said, 
"If it were not for the Empire, I would not care to 
be an Englishman." " Certainly, " he replied, "I 
have never doubted her formal right to an Empire. 
But we do not propose that she shall have one. . . . 
She is not fit to have one. " If he had stopped before 
the last sentence, he would have left the issue one 
of undebatable and wholly primitive simplicity, Ger- 
many 's I-will versus Britain's Thou-shalt-not. 
But so to state the case is evidently at once to 



70 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

justify the whole method of Realpolitik, and to play 
false to all the genuine purposes of Great Britain 
and of ourselves. And the only alternative is to 
hold to the original view that beneath all 
clashes of will there are clashes of principle; 
that the way forward is to insist, against 
whatever difficulty, that the thought and conscience 
of the race shall gradually penetrate all conflicts 
until we find their meaning in terms of ideas. To 
do otherwise is to give up the tendency of social 
evolution toward a more thoughtful, lawful, and 
consistent world ; it is to accept the defeat of a moral 
control of history at the hand of the cruder and 
simpler fact. It is to give Germany the right. For 
how much of German life and culture can be under- 
stood as an expression of weariness of spiritual 
evolution I In her adoption of skepticism and agnos- 
ticism, reason has turned upon its own work to limit 
the scope of reason's conquests; in her espousal of 
Realpolitik, law has turned upon the growth of law 
and has said, thus far, and no farther ; in the moral 
cynicism which underlies all this, and which thinks 
itself the more enlightened view of things, spiritual 
ambition has turned against its own natural free- 
dom and has made itself a slave to material interest 
and hard fact. 

I do not doubt that much of this suicidal hostility 
of the spirit to the spiritual element is due to the 
thinness and abstraction of much of the prevalent 
talk about principles. Abstract idealism is a poor 



THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 71 

solution of the problems that confront "real" states- 
manship; and there are brands of Christianity 
known to everyone that would drive any able-headed 
man to Realpolitik for a breath of vital air. What- 
ever the principles at stake in this war, the answer 
to Realpolitik is not to be found in a reaction to the 
older formulae from which Realpolitik is itself a 
reaction. 

But the adequate principles must be found, will be 
found, are being found. And this means that we 
accept the consequences, — whatever critical light 
these principles throw upon our own social order. 
And we accept also the task of dealing with the 
apparent argument that accompanies this criticism, 
that being imperfect ourselves we ought to go easy 
in the fighting. The task should not be a hard one. 

The premise of the argument is that we ought to 
fight only what we ourselves are free from, — or, in 
effect, that only saints and angels have any right 
to fight. This is a natural misreading of the senti- 
ment that has permeated the Christian world, "Let 
him that is without sin among you cast the first 
stone. ' ' There is a vein of pacifism in this misread- 
ing that needs not so much to be rebuked as to be 
explained. 

The point is, I take it, that issues not raised by 
ourselves have to be met as they arise, and where 
they arise. If it is we ourselves who are raising 
issues, it is desirable to make sure that one's own 



72 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

house is clean before attacking the condition of one's 
neighbor's house. If history makes the issue for 
us, we have to decide where we stand on that; and 
then, if we are honest, accept the consequences for 
ourselves. "We should have every reason to feel 
shame and hesitancy in war if having taken up the 
cry of the rights of small nations we rode over any 
such rights without compunction, or harbored any 
personal profits from old wrongs. Even so, I am 
not sure that we would be justified in letting the 
call for protection pass by without response, on the 
ground that we have sins of our own we want to 
hold to for a while longer. 

We must accept the logic of what we do abroad 
as applied to what we do at home. But the demand 
that we attend to what we have to remedy at home 
first, must sometimes be recognized for what it is, 
a hurdle deliberately thrown into the path of the 
runner. It is natural that the principles applied in 
small groups work their way outward; tyranny in 
private life will tend to follow the individual into 
his public relations, and conversely, liberality at 
home will have a tendency to carry itself over into 
business and political practice. But it is also a natu- 
ral law that public principles work their vjay in- 
ward; and the State, in some ways behind the pri- 
vate standard of morals, is in other ways in the lead. 
Liberality in politics did in fact precede by some 
centuries the regime of equality in the family: the 
issue was first raised in the public life. And so it is 



THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 73 

with the issue which German thoroughness has made 
so clear in the international order : the very clarity 
and vigor with which we rise to it will carry many 
an internal reform past the obstacle on which it has 
been hanging, simply because we see that the prin- 
ciple is the same, and we are willing to follow it 
where it leads. We shall take these things up in 
their order; but the war must be settled now. 

Meantime, we may freely acknowledge that the 
principle of Realpolitik is not peculiar to Germany. 
It has shown its head more or less mixed and dis- 
guised in the practises of all nations. It would not 
be hard to mention spots in our own public life 
which are condemned by what we now profess before 
the world ; and with some of these spots we may and 
must deal even now. 

The President has justly called our attention to 
lynching as an example of what we are warring 
against. Where people think the law remiss or 
slow, there is a natural anti-law feeling and an im- 
pulse to revert to fact. It is a method which clearly 
does nothing to make law more adequate to its task ; 
it is Realpolitik. 

Perhaps the best example of Kaiserism at home is 
the spirit of what is known as profiteering. Its 
theory is, when you see a chance for yourself, take 
it; and the wider interest be damned. The social 
world is not yet a place of complete justice in the 
distributing of wealth; there are accidental heap- 



74 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

ings here and there; the race is sometimes to the 
strong, and sometimes merely to the fortunately 
placed; instead of blaming the man who seizes the 
chance that knocks at his door, people are likely to 
regard him as a fool who fails to do so. Sympathy 
for the slow is not vivid; and in the speed of liv- 
ing, men judge much by results and seldom scruti- 
nize methods very closely. "Everybody does it; 
and if I don't look out for myself, nobody will look 
out for me"; this is a philosophy which men can 
easily get from a shrewd reading of the times, — the 
times preceding to-day. "If the Government will 
let me alone for a year, I don't care what it does 
next; I will have mine by that time," said one such 
philosopher. Such men do nothing to make the lack- 
ing social justice grow; they fail to realize that 
this irresponsible self-seeking, the whole worth of 
whose gains is made by the good-will of the ex- 
ploited community, has suddenly become out of 
date. And why? Because the community, because 
labor, has been quick to see that it is nothing but 
Prussianism in the economic sphere; and they will 
fight against the one only as they at the same time 
fight against the other. 

And it will be well for the foresight of labor if it 
sees the case so clearly that it will cut from its own 
program the tendency to fight profiteering by profit- 
eering of its own, thus tying its own hands in the 
fight for a better order of justice by its eagerness 
not to be backward in getting "its own." 



THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 75 

Because this issue will not be postponed, but must 
be met and is being met from day to day while the 
war is being fought, profiteering, whether on the part 
of labor or capital, must be recognized as the great- 
est single menace to our fighting strength at home, 
the greatest single source of flagging morale. Wher- 
ever it is present it sicklies the faith of the knowing 
ones that any sound act can come from a social body 
thus inwardly diseased. "We are willing to work 
and to fight to the end to defeat Prussianism; but 
we are not willing to give an ounce of our labor nor 
a drop of our blood to enrich private individuals ' ' : 
thus labor has stated its judgment time and again on 
the floor of Commons, and elsewhere. And the 
farther-sighted men of affairs have seen that by the 
very nature of the war-issue, the profiteer is play- 
ing the traitor not alone to the public interest, but 
to the cause of business itself, in the public judg- 
ment. For the public is alert to the point that it 
cannot and need not continue to sanction in busi- 
ness that spirit of ignoring the interests of others 
which is being banished from international affairs 
on the fields of France. 

Not only this, but never in the history of business 
has there been such an impulse to sacrifice for the 
common cause on the part of men of power and 
wealth. The profiteering that exists is local; the 
leaping forward to give is general, as if welcoming 
the opening of a new era. The external logic has 
worked its way inward; and the great fact of so- 



76 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

ciety to-day is that men generally can believe in 
possibilities of which they had formerly given up 
hope. Nothing could go farther to confirm the 
morale of the nation than to fix attention on the con- 
spicuous examples of the new spirit rather than 
on the examples of private greed which can always 
be found. For the new spirit can be confirmed only 
by being recognized and built upon.* 

Lynching and profiteering, then, have felt the 
repercussion of the public campaign against Prus- 
sianism. But we may say with equal truth that we 

*A good example of it may be seen in the action of the National 
Federation of Millers in giving up by voluntary agreement of prac- 
tically the entire trade the enormous profits being wafted into 
their hands by the abnormal course of events quite without their 
deliberate manipulation. The milling business has been rated as 
third in volume in the United States; and its output has been, under 
existing conditions, not less important in winning the war than 
that of the steel, coal, and copper industries. They were producing 
on a rapidly and automatically rising market when Mr. Hoover 
was appointed administrator; and at once their National Federa- 
tion authorized a committee to offer their co-operation. It was a 
moment in which only immediate and voluntary action would have 
met the emergency of the coming winter; and the administration 
invited and accepted plans for voluntary co-operation proposed 
by the millers' committee. These plans, limiting profits to 25 
cents per barrel, have been steadily and loyally administered by 
a joint committee on which are serving a number of the most 
prominent millers of the country who, to do their work more effect- 
ively, have not alone given up active connection with their own 
mills, but have disposed of their stock. This has been done by 
Mr. Bell of the Washburn-Crosby Mills, Mr. Eckhart of Chicago, 
Mr. Mennel of Toledo, and others. 

Steel interests, brass interests, copper, and lead interests have 
made concessions to the situation ; and it may fairly be said of 
them that they have taken less profit than they might have done, 
though under present conditions this is only to say, in many cases, 
that they have allowed enormous profits to be reduced to the dimen- 
sions of only huge profits. But the action of the millers, which 
went far to tide over the distress of the past winter in Europe, is an 
act of genuine sacrifice, and the sort of act which will go far to 
destroy at home what we oppose abroad. 



THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 77 

are fighting cynicism, or selfishness, or materialism, 
and at once, the inner corollaries of our under- 
taking widen without measure. In a way, all evil 
is akin, and there is little logical excuse for singling 
out one evil amongst many as the particular cousin 
of the enemy's idea that we must eliminate from our- 
selves. There is none of them that we can defend; 
and there is none of them that does not ally us more 
or less directly with the enemy. 

But this only reveals the truism that in a world 
guilty in many ways a perfect morale is unobtain- 
able; that in proportion to our thoughtfulness the 
blow aimed in one direction will bring to conscious- 
ness the necessity of blows aimed in various other 
quarters, with a certain tendency to confusion of 
purpose. This confusion must remain until we see 
the necessity of history which singles out for us the 
point upon which our energy must be directed. We 
learn in time the error of faltering in the pursuit of 
the present business because there are other wars 
to fight. And we learn the wisdom of accepting the 
priority of the political issue; for what men adopt 
in their political life they build into the common 
moral substratum for all their living. 



CHAPTER IX 

STATE-BLINDNESS 

Theee is an old tale of a man in the East who had 
given up nearly everything in the service of his 
god, and whose devotion earned him an early death. 
In his last hours this man found this his deity, who 
had hitherto seemed as real to him as any living 
man, suddenly withdrew into obscurity until he 
could no longer be distinguished from the phantoms 
of his imagination. ''My God," he exclaimed, as the 
scenes of his pain-filled and seemingly futile life- 
time crowded his dying mind, "my God, why hast 
thou forsaken me?" 

This species of doubt is not confined to the re- 
ligious. It is particularly at home on the battlefield, 
where men are led to the shambles by a very similar 
devotion to an equally invisible and elusive being, — 
the State. All the realistic reporters of the sol- 
dier's mind, men like McGill and Barbusse, echo the 
horrible sense of emptiness, disillusion, deserted- 
ness, futility, that supervenes as the question presses 
home unanswered, "What is it that I am serving?" 

And not on the battlefield alone, but wherever men 
and women are asked to make large sacrifice "for 
the nation," they are subject to a checking of im- 
pulsive patriotism, because that being has a way of 

78 



STATE-BLINDNESS 79 

escaping the grip of our minds, even more, perhaps, 
than that other being, the enemy, whom we oppose. 
In the present war, I judge this the most serious of 
the insidious leaks in national morale. 

For it may be taken, I believe, as a peculiarity of 
this war that there are arrayed under the banners of 
various national States thousands who question the 
right of national States to exist, together with other 
thousands to whom the words "France," "Eng- 
land," etc., are but names for aggregates of indi- 
viduals, words standing for nothing unitary and 
real. They find themselves strangely offering their 
lives for "France," for "America," — and yet with- 
out any adequate interest in these masses of indi- 
vidual Frenchmen or Americans : confronted with a 
random group of them, the "cash value" of these 
national names, they would see little reason why 
they should die for their welfare. 

What imagination presents as the object of all 
these sacrifices is something over and above the sum 
of the persons in the State — a glorified being, as we 
said : yet, in cold blood, is this symbolic figure any- 
thing more than an emotional projection of the 
group-instinct, easily capable of being too super- 
stitiously regarded, even of becoming an obstacle in 
the path of a wider spirit of humanity? These are 
intellectual considerations, no doubt, which the war 
spirit has shown itself strong enough to sweep 
away ; but just because men come to realize that they 
have been affected by feeling, by ' ' patriotism, ' ' they 



80 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

are vulnerable to the attack of these questions when 
they return, as they inevitably do. 

Prior to the war, M. Gustave Herve, speaking as 
he thought for French socialism, said: 

"We are anti-patriot internationalists, and have 
in no degree a love for the mother country. Hence 
we do not know what national honor is. The politi- 
cal superiority of the French Government over the 
German is so slight . . . that it is a matter of indif- 
ference to us whether we are French or German. 
We have thus decided to answer an order of mobili- 
zation by a general strike, of reservists at first, and 
then finally by insurrection. As for the defense of 
our mother country, we will give neither one drop of 
blood nor one square centimeter of our skin."* 

We take it as greatly to the honor of M. Herve 
and of French socialism generally that this view of 
things was promptly discarded at the call of war. 
But the practical repudiation has not yet been fol- 
lowed by the repudiation of the principle. And 
while such views have not gathered so vigorous a 
following in America it is not so clear a$ it might be 
that we have a substantial answer to them. Some 
years prior to the war, Mr. H. G. Wells made a 
rapid tour of this country, publishing his impres- 
sions in a volume called "The Future in America." 
One of his striking comments was that as a people 
we are ' ' State-blind. " As a matter of fact our poli- 
tical upbringing has done much to make us so. 

We are, in the first place, individualists by con- 
viction. We regard the State as an agency existing 

•Quoted by Sir Martin Conway. "The Crowd in Peace and in War." 



STATE-BLINDNESS 81 

not for its own sake, but to serve us. It derives 
all its powers from the consent of the governed. It 
is there, like other agencies, to do certain specific 
things because we want them done: it has no in- 
trinsic rights of its own, not to speak of divine 
right. 

And in the second place, we have a feeling that 
"the State governs best that governs least." We 
do not want to be reminded of the State at every 
turn by omnipresent officers, soldiers, ceremonies. 
We want to treat it like a good digestion, — and for- 
get it. 

On the whole we are in a state of mind such that 
if any one says to us that a workman in one country 
has more in common with a workman in another 
country than he has with his own employer merely 
as fellow-citizen of the State, we are quite prepared 
to believe it. After all, what have we in common, 
merely as fellow-citizens? Various respectable so- 
cial theories are afloat among us, and not a little in- 
fluential, to the effect that the economic tie, the com- 
munity of interest represented by the common craft 
or industry or profession, is the fundamental social 
cohesive; and that the political bond is quite sec- 
ondary, having only a relative, changing, and per- 
haps vanishing importance. 

If I say, then, that our patriotism, fervent as it is, 
is yet essentially impulsive and a degree sentimental, 
I believe I speak sober truth. We are profoundly 
loyal to something; but we very dimly understand 



82 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

what we are loyal to, and are perhaps more than a 
little dubious about it in the bottom of our hearts. 
Mr. Wells was not far wrong in saying that we are 
State-blind. 

In a war in which one fights for "the rights of 
small nations everywhere" (among other objects), 
this uncertainty about what the State is constitutes 
a serious weak spot in our moral armor. In more 
than one sense, "patriotism is not enough" ; it needs 
a justification. It is evident that neither systems of 
police nor administrative arrangements — if this is 
all — are worth the loss of a man. The economic 
common-interest — if this is the chief meaning of po- 
litical society — can justify no sacrifice but that of 
money. 

But these are not the substance of the State. 
The economic cement has never yet of itself effected 
a living social union; it is of a kind that crumbles 
when it is dry. If it seems to unite men, it is be- 
cause it is mixed with something else ; and it is this 
of which we should like to catch a glimpse, though 
like all other great and permanent things it tends 
to retreat into subconsciousness, and is at a dis- 
advantage for being shown and recognized. Let me 
make the attempt, nevertheless, to conjure up in a 
few words what seems to me most tangible in the 
entity which we call the State. 

1. We can readily unravel the entire mass of 
groupings called society into two fairly distinct 



STATE-BLINDNESS 83 

kinds : the private life on one side having its center 
in the family and branching ont into friendly, fra- 
ternal, and "social" groupings in the narrower 
sense; and then the public life, impersonal and en- 
terprising, having its center in the trade or pro- 
fessional activity, in which one is valued for his 
yield and not primarily for his personal quality. A 
man's day usually dips into both these spheres and 
alternates between them; he has his local root, or 
home, and he has his roving, venturesome, specula- 
tive career, and each of these serves the other, — 
neither one alone can claim to possess the real self 
of the man. 

We should perhaps place the State at once as a 
part of the public rather than of the private life 
of a man : and yet the State, which once had a form 
resembling the family, still has something in com- 
mon with it. The modern State, at least, cares 
more about the individual man than does the eco- 
nomic order ; its laws and courts aim to provide that 
no wrong shall be done to him ; and its charities that 
no ultimate misfortune shall deprive him of the 
plain necessities of living. The State thus encour- 
ages the venturesome and experimental side of life 
by ensuring that the personal interest shall not be 
wholly lost in it. 

If anything is more amazing than the intricacy 
of the entanglement of every man's life with that 
of others in a modern community, it is the slight 
awareness we have of that mesh of mutual depend- 



84 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

encies: each one simply " attends to his own busi- 
ness." The infinitely complex pattern of matted 
twigs and grasses at the water's edge is formed by 
the simple obedience of each strand to the play of 
the current. But in the case of the human network, 
this economy of consciousness is possible only be- 
cause one agency is set apart to know the result of 
the weaving from moment to moment, and to guide 
it in its effect on the individual strands. What we 
call laws are no stable principles of nature: they 
are experimental adjustments made by a mind 
which has a care both for the value of the whole and 
for the interest of every dot in the pattern, and with 
the ceaseless vigilance and continuity of thought of 
an inventor, follows experiment with experiment 
forever. 

Thus the State, when it is what it should be, acts 
as a sort of over-parent, — not in spite of our in- 
dividualism, but because of it. The ' ' rights ' ' which 
are to be ' ' secured to us " are not mere generalities 
that are completely provided for by police action in 
warding off injuries: they are positive interests 
which can be achieved only by the inventive effort 
of a thinking agent. The individual does not be- 
come strong as the State becomes weak, but the 
reverse: it is only the strong State that can gen- 
erate strong individuals. 

For the State is not a mere protector of the day's 
work: it everywhere raises the level of the day's 
work. It does this in part by providing what Bage- 



STATE-BLINDNESS 85 

hot called "a calculable future," so that there is no 
theoretical limit to the duration of the enterprises 
that can be begun with a fair knowledge of what 
they can continue to count on, — whether the build- 
ing of pyramids and cathedrals, the cutting of ca- 
nals, or the making of railway systems. And it 
does this still more by securing a cumulative past, so 
that nothing of import to the common life is lost, 
and each new life owns all that has come to light of 
scientific lore, of skill, of device, of wit and beauty 
and insight, and of the personal treasury of the 
tribe. Without his history man is without his 
measures, his standards, and his own proper stat- 
ure ; and without the State he is without his history. 

2. But granted that the State does these things 
for its citizens, as things are now, why need they 
be done by the State? Men have to go through a 
dismal apprenticeship of external control in order 
to realize all the conditions of their existence and 
to value them: every casting must have its case, 
but once the metal is set, the shell is cracked off and 
thrown away. Are we not now coming to a maturity 
of social mind in which the expensive and faulty 
method of State-control can be discarded for some- 
thing growing Up more directly out of the heart 
of industry and of society? 

The question is searching, and should bring to 
light a less obvious element in the being and work 
of the State, the continuous creation of "society." 

As things are now, every mind of us — by aid of 



86 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

the morning paper — acts as a small center of con- 
templation and judgment of all that goes on in the 
large world of many interests. It seems to us that 
in that morning survey of the universe the State 
has no necessary part, except that it is one of the 
actors on the stage, one among many. Without it 
we should still have a world, a set of common in- 
terests, — and a morning paper. But in Russia to- 
day we are not sure of the morning paper ; and not 
the least oppressive element in the chaos that has 
settled down on that unfortunate people is the limit 
of the power of vision, the fluctuating border of the 
sphere within which any concrete proposition is 
true or valid. Russia is the most eloquent answer 
to political pluralism. 

The point is, that without the State there are no 
common interests to be watched, any more than a 
means of watching them. The most central blunder 
of the State-blind mentality, — a blunder made easy 
by the good working of the modern State itself, — 
is the supposition that common interests exist of 
themselves, whereas they have both to be devised by 
deliberate inventive acts and promoted by positive 
deeds. One of the leading economists of this land, 
Professor Carver, has named "the existence of un- 
satisfied wants and the consequent antagonism of 
interests ' ' as the fundamental social fact. This fact 
exists in its full perfection among beasts in a jungle 
with a carcass between them; in the abstract they 
have a common interest, namely, to divide the car- 



STATE-BLINDNESS 87 

cass and limit their appetite that both beasts may 
survive. But the essential conditions which would 
make that outcome possible are lacking, — a mind 
to propose the idea and a will to administer it. This 
common interest, and all common interests, must 
be enacted. The fundamental social fact is the 
enactor; and that being, in developed societies, is 
the State. 

3. The State so far appears as a servant, but a 
necessary servant, of the most vital of our practical 
interests. It creates the world, not alone the world 
in which we wish to think but also the world in which 
we wish to act. Having a natural immortality, as 
we individuals have not, it confers a durability 
upon our deeds that otherwise they would lack; it 
cannot make our souls immortal, but it can approach 
another kind of immortality which to not a few 
minds has seemed more desirable, an immortality 
of work, and in rare cases of one's name and mem- 
ory. To speak within wholly literal bounds, the 
State lends its longest dimension to the work of 
every honest worker ; and if we cannot say that this 
work can, by any earthly agency, be made eternal, it 
may at least be saved from being merely local and 
passing. Apart from the State, human experience 
would be a perpetual recurrence of ancient mistakes ; 
with the State, even the errors and failures of men 
contribute to the total advance, since they make those 
failures evident to those that follow. What signifi- 
cance and value our individual thoughts and per- 



88 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

formances have is thus largely conferred on them 
by their political framework. 

It is not too much to say that apart from the 
State, life is not worth living for such as we have 
come to be under its guardianship ; though the man 
compelled to live in a State that has corrupted the 
sources of its own just functioning may be worse off 
than apart from the State. 

4. Creating the common interests, the State cre- 
ates the conditions that make sacrifice significant. 

The highest happiness of man is found in what he 
can do and give, not in what he can get ; and in this 
sense there is a need for power which is the most 
honorable thing in us, power for our fellows rather 
than over them. So deep is this instinct for doing 
for others, that what to an outsider may seem a sacri- 
fice on the part of parent or friend may to the agent 
seem the one activity that makes life worth living. 
Sacrifice, as men call it, is normally an exercise of 
power, and felt as such; and only when it has this 
character is it significant and valuable. Whatever 
makes sacrifice thus powerful gives human life its 
highest meaning. 

It is evident that there are situations when sacri- 
fice is mere folly and waste. "Altruism" has no in- 
herent merit; giving of one's labor and blood to 
enrich the greedy has no virtue ; the subjective cru- 
sades of a Don Quixote may claim the laughter, 
hardly the respect of men. The gift of the silver 
service by Father Bienvenu to Jean Valjean came 



STATE-BLINDNESS 89 

very near being such a foolish sacrifice ; it failed of 
this, and saved the soul tottering in the balance. 
The deepest problem of social life is that of dis- 
criminating between the wise and powerful sacrifice 
and the sacrifice that is weak and futile. Men are 
ready to be martyrs in the one case ; they are ready 
for the extreme of self-assertion in the other. This 
is the dilemma of labor to-day. It is the dilemma of 
the realists on the battlefield, the Barbusses, the 
McGills, who see the ruin and the waste and see 
not that it is for anything that gives it the charac- 
ter of human dignity and achievement. 

What makes the difference ? My answer is : The 
reality of the common interest, in some cases already 
present, in some cases to be created by the act of sac- 
rifice itself. The foolish act of altruism is the act 
that throws one 's life into a chasm, or deprives one- 
self of a good to appease an infinite hunger which is 
neither filled by it nor capable of valuing it. The 
nursing of vipers, the casting of pearls before swine, 
have become proverbial of the unintelligent self- 
alienation which is but indirect suicide and the re- 
jection of life. If there is class war, personal war, 
national war, all sacrifice of one side for the other, 
all non-resistance which merely makes way for the 
arrogant will, is the folly which becomes equivalent 
to treason. The significant sacrifice is the creative 
sacrifice, the sacrifice that wakens the enemy's con- 
science and rebuilds broken communications. But 
such sacrifice cannot occur at random; it cannot be 



90 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

made by any tour de force of will without regard 
to circumstance or setting. 

It must be evident whither this argument leads. 
It is the presence of the State which, for the great 
mass of us, makes the difference between the sacri- 
fic which is folly and the sacrifice which is wisdom. 
If there were no State, the giving away of my goods 
to one who demanded them would be an act of fling- 
ing crumbs to fill an infinite maw, or of trying to 
lift the seas with a dipper. It would be the meaning- 
less and wicked form of self-sacrifice unless, indeed, 
by that act I could create an attachment between my- 
self and the receiver which would mark the begin- 
ning of a stable understanding between us, a rela- 
tion of "polity"; and such a relationship would be 
an incipient community or State. If there were no 
State, it would be my duty, as I valued my own hap- 
piness, to lose no chance to bring such community to 
pass; if there were no State, it would be a man's 
first business to begin one. 

Once established, the State provides the moral 
framework within which acts of sacrifice, all labors 
and offerings for the common good, may become sig- 
nificant; because every man's share in the growing 
common good acts as a pledge that he will stand by, 
at least to understand, if not to respond to, what 
is done for him. Nothing is radiated off into empty 
space. There are, or should be, no social chasms 
which cannot be crossed by the creative impulse of 
good- will ; no feuds, no quarrels, no class wars, which 



STATE-BLINDNESS 91 

cannot be wiped out. Democracy, as a principle of 
State-structure, is the express denial that any such 
impassable chasms or irreducible clashes of interest, 
exist. 

We are still far from the pure democracy ; we are 
still far from the perfect State. We are still in a 
world in which those who choose to look passively 
on the defects, the selfishness of the existing order, 
can find much to support their contempt. It is still 
possible to read much that happens — if one enjoys 
the sense of his own superiority in so reading it — 
as dupery, the leading of lambs to the slaughter by 
the crafty of this world. One can see the "leaders" 
of men as "prodders-from-behind," driving the 
masses on as cannon-fodder, that their endless greed 
may be temporarily appeased. If it is a man's rul- 
ing passion to be saved from dupery, he may indeed 
escape ; but more than likely he will become the dupe 
of his own distrust. 

It is not the part of a man to live on the dif- 
ference between himself and the villains he can 
discover or surmise ; it is the part of a man to live 
on the kernel of soundness and honesty that is at 
the heart of things, that will outlive all shams and 
frauds and corruptions, and to give himself to that, 
as to God. The State we have been talking about 
exists, but it exists in germ; and that germ is in 
peril. Better men than we have seen the vision and 
have bled for it; there is but one way in which the 



92 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

faith of those who have gone before and the hope 
of those who come after can be brought to earth. 
And that way, however perilous, is possible; the 
beginnings are made ; its security lies in the quarter 
whither the allied armies are driving. It is the thing 
worth living for, and if need be, worth dying for. 



PART II 
MORALE OF THE FIGHT ING MAN 



CHAPTER X 

PSYCHOLOGY OP THE SOLDIER 

Ant one — and certainly the soldier — might reason- 
ably resent the suggestion that there is something 
peculiar about his psychology. Soldiers of to-day 
are not a separate caste with distinct talents and 
specialized moral development ; they are not chosen 
like gladiators for their native muscle and pugna- 
city; they are not bred like fighting-cocks for their 
irritability and gameness. They are plain men, en- 
gaged in a special and temporary task ; they intend, 
most of them, to become plain citizens once more 
when that task is done. 

In ancient and in feudal times, it was considered 
not that the soldier, but that most of the rest of 
society, was a little peculiar. City life, trade life, 
farm life, were supposed to sap the warlike temper 
and produce an unspirited human variety. The 
former contempt for the merchant was due not only 
to the idea that he was given over to an unmanly 
sort of competition, that he liked too well the rule 
of the civil order whereby everything must be got 
by wit and nothing by courage, that he too willingly 
forgot how far the security of that very rule de- 
pends on men of another fiber: it was due also, I 
presume, to sad experience in various attempts to 

95 



96 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

turn him, in an emergency, into a warrior. For in 
the earlier stages of the division of labor, a very 
real division of mental quality took place with it, 
and these mental grooves between occupational 
groups tended to deepen. Agricultural populations 
became an easy prey to the wilder tribes about 
them; wealthy cities had to buy their protection 
from sounder-spirited professional fighters. Even 
to-day, the phrase "a nation of shop-keepers" has 
just enough sting in it to make the eagle and the 
lion squirm. 

But we have learned how to be specialists with- 
out sacrificing too much of what is called "all- 
around development." Occupation still leaves its 
heavy mental mark ; but the disappearance of hered- 
itary trades, the liberal mingling and cross-classing 
of men on all lines of interest outside of their work, 
and the immense growth of new arts of recreation go 
far to erase it, until seemingly only enough is left 
of the visible trade-mark of carpenter, teacher, 
grocer, lawyer, teamster, artist, parson, for the cari- 
caturist — and Sherlock Holmes — to work upon. In 
free modern States, every man is in essentials a 
complete man: the soldierly qualities are in him, 
and can be turned to account when occasion de- 
mands. So, from the ranks of labor and trade, 
from students, clerks, and professional men, we 
recruit an army that we are ready to set against the 
most pretentious military machine the world has 
yet seen assembled. This army contains men of 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 97 

every variety of taste and temper, who will by no 
means cease to be themselves because for the time 
they are soldiers. What is the point, then, in speak- 
ing of the psychology of the soldier? 

It is this. That a man's mental self cannot be 
separated from his daily habits, from the environ- 
ment he lives in, from the kind of difficulties he is 
coping with, from the plans, ambitions, and ideas 
he is occupied with. In all these ways, the mind of 
the soldier is marked off from the mind of the same 
man in civil life. Soldiering is a life having its own 
special strains, and its own standards. It not only 
brings different muscles into action ; it tests charac- 
ter in new places. It is a profession in itself: one 
in which an amateur can indeed win his spurs, but 
only by dint of such "trying" as he may not have 
known he was capable of. Indeed, a large part of 
the demand which this new environment imposes 
upon the recruit is that he learns what it means to 
"try," until the slack and sag of an indulgent ex- 
istence are taken out of him. Further, the army is 
a world of peculiar structure : the conditions of suc- 
cess and the meaning of success are not the same 
as elsewhere ; consequently it is not always the same 
men who come to the top. In all these ways, it re- 
quires and tends to produce a mentality of its own. 

The immediate change of garb and of code of 
manners is prophetic of the inward transformation 
which — more or less instinctively — we expect to fol- 



98 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

low. Society takes a new look at every man when 
he has stepped into uniform. It knows that he is 
making a fundamental start once more from the 
beginning; and that few of his habits or ideas will 
be unaffected. It has, indeed, learned to avoid the 
waste involved in assuming that prior talents and 
training count for nothing; and that all must begin 
again at zero. But all talents are to undergo a new 
test and rating on the basis of the special demands 
of the service. Many a man who has been pegging 
away at a task not quite suited to him, never gaining 
headway enough to leap the hurdle just ahead, finds 
himself now dealing with a technique he can readily 
master and with a margin. This margin fits him 
for a step on the ladder; and with responsibility, 
latent and unsuspected powers of command are 
brought to the surface. Thus, in the army, many a 
man is born again. And many another is converted 
in another sense, by having to face at last the kind 
of task he has habitually shrunk from, and learning 
the age-old human lessons of labor and obedience. 
There is thus a re-sifting of human material in 
the army ; and the truths men discover about them- 
selves, welcome or unwelcome, leave their lasting 
marks in consciousness. The occasional reversal 
of social position that occurs — exploited in various 
popular war-plays, as if it were a step in the direc- 
tion of more essential justice — is but an external 
symptom of this new growth within, which comes 
alike to nearly every man in the service. 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 99 

The basic part of this mental change — seldom the 
most conscious part — is simply what is symbolized 
by the uniform itself, the new relation which the 
soldier holds to the rest of society, and which he 
will feel most quickly in its altered attitude toward 
him. It is finely sketched by Barrie in a play which 
represents a father coming with difficulty to recog- 
nize that his son has suddenly supplanted him as 
the head of the family, by virtue of the fact that he 
is now its defender. As one such father said to me, 
"I look upon my sons now with a sort of awe, for I 
know that they have been meeting things which it 
will never be my lot to meet." The ferment that 
works more or less subconsciously in every soldier's 
mind, and brings other changes of personality in its 
train is this : that society in its hard hour has found 
in him what it needed. A foundation of conscious 
worth or validity is laid in him, which is distinct in 
its quality from that of other social successes, more 
primitive and more inalienable. 

I do not say that this sense of import in the sol- 
dier's consciousness is always good: it may become 
a sense of importance and special privilege and be 
his damnation. It is natural that the distinguishing 
character of the soldier's psychology should be its 
distinguishing malady, when it goes wrong, gen- 
erating the braggart, the libertine, the military 
loafer, the claim-all, or the swashbuckler. 

And I do not say that the new strains of army 
existence necessarily "show what men really are" 



100 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

or ''give their true measure." Not uncommonly a 
man knows very well that in becoming a soldier 
he is leaving behind him his best chances of show- 
ing what is in him. The "real man," presumably, 
is found in the work his talents fit him to do : where- 
as much that is in men, the army makes no pretence 
to measure or to use. There is a good deal of un- 
fairness, and even of mental treason to social wel- 
fare, in the instinctive assumption that the men 
who can rough-it with distinguished efficiency, your 
Crusoes, your admirable Crichtons, real men as they 
are, are the only real men, while the rest are but 
shams or parasites. 

Yet there is this degree of justice in the case : that 
war, like every direct encounter with natural ob- 
stacles, calls not so much for special talents as for 
the common denominators of human nature, the 
qualities which every man is supposed to have be- 
cause they form the basis of all the rest. The ele- 
mental grit, the will to power, must be there at the 
foundation of character if anything good is to come 
out of us. Art, poetry, philosophy transform — 
but do not omit, this essential virility : in music — if 
it is good music, in wit — if it works, we feel the ul- 
timate tang; we surmise the force that mind could 
bring to bear against the original challenges of phys- 
ical nature. Thus the musician or poet who becomes 
the soldier gives evidence not alone of the vitality 
of his body but also of the vitality of his art. The 
pride of the soldier is pride not merely in his fight- 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 101 

ing powers, but in the integrity of all his work. 
And society is right, in principle, in citing the vigor 
of its fighting men as pertinent evidence in disproof 
of the accusation of decadence: in honoring them 
it takes a just pride in its own soundness. 

I believe, therefore, that the popular feeling for 
the man in arms is rationally justified ; it is no mere 
matter of " crowd psychology." And this feeling, 
which like all others has to learn its own due balance 
by experience, is an integral part of the soldier's 
basic self-confidence : so far as he fills the character 
of a soldier, he deserves it, — it belongs to him. 

Except when he is mixing with the populace, how- 
ever, and sensitive to their admiration (or neglect, 
as the case may be), the soldier's consciousness is 
little occupied with his social worth or other merits. 
It is occupied with a highly prosaic round of duties. 
War is an eruption of extraordinary evil somewhere 
in the world, and the character of its origin marks 
all the measures devised to wage it. Long before 
he reaches the trenches, the soldier has occasion to 
know that his task is one of exigency and stress. 
Permanence, abundance, grace, and beauty are not 
the leading traits of barracks life. The merely art- 
ful side of civilian manners disappears as by magic. 
"The relations between man and man," as Paul 
Lintier says, " become primitively direct. One's first 
preoccupation is to make oneself respected." The 
immediate contest with nature, digging, scrubbing, 



102 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

cleaning, lugging, fills the hours not given to mili- 
tary formations, increasingly as one approaches the 
front. Masefield has said that his composite picture 
of war is that of a man begrimed and mud-sodden, 
carrying a heavy load. And one wonders whether 
the psychological variation of the soldier is not 
really in the direction of the drudge rather than in 
that of the traditional hero. 

In his very spontaneous "Reactions of a Rookie," 
Mr. Walter Agard offers some rather savage reflec- 
tions upon a letter from the front in which a college 
lad wrote as follows : 

"I'm thankful for what this war is doing for me. 
It has grown hair on my chest, taught me to obey 
disagreeable orders graciously, and wiped away the 
damn superficial attitude of college." 

Mr. Agard had reached the state of mind in which 
the civilization he had left behind him was glowing 
in alluring colors. He could feel little sympathy 
with a man to whom behavior ' ' essentially common- 
place, obvious, and unrefined" could bring a re- 
freshing smack of sincerity and strength. The best 
things in literature, science, philosophy, he realized, 
are not superficial matters; they are not "veneer": 
they are life itself. To be forced to leave them is 
not a good, but a calamity: to find oneself improv- 
ing under the change, — bah ! — what an ass one must 
have been before! 

It stands to reason that there is nothing intrinsi- 
cally desirable in crudity and dirt. What the world 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 103 

has been laboring these thousands of years to secure 
in the way of life 's amenities is certainly better than 
the ' ' state of nature ' ' left behind, — far better there- 
fore than what the soldier has to return to. It re- 
mains true that while the things are better, the peo- 
ple who enjoy them are not necessarily made better 
by the things: there is always a chance for moral 
loss or malproportion in the way society treats its 
advantages. There is no absurdity in the idea that 
a man who thoroughly appreciates the good things 
of peace should find in the situation of the soldier 
something of his character that he had previously 
missed. 

One of the most genuine soldiers it has been my 
privilege to know, Capt. Norman Hall, now of the 
Lafayette Flying Squadron, came to Plattsburgh 
as just such a rookie, after serving for a year or 
more in the Flanders fighting with " Kitchener's 
Mob." He wanted to compare the American with 
the British system of training. At that time the 
impulse to get back into the trenches was strong 
upon him ; and it was not for any particular blood- 
thirsty streak in his disposition, nor for any love 
of trench conditions. Hall, too, was a college man, 
though I doubt whether he suffered much from the 
i ' damn superficial attitude ' ' : he knew what civiliza- 
tion was worth. But in that impulse of his to get 
back, there was, beside other things, a human in- 
terest. ' ' Over there, ' ' he said, ' ' you see men as they 
are; something comes out in them that one hardly 



104 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

finds anywhere else."* Even in these days when 
war has become so much a matter of engineering 
and infernal toil, the fancy that it may develop ad- 
mirable qualities in men is not a myth. 

It is, however, a part of the psychology of the 
soldier that these qualities should be more visible 
to everybody else than to himself. The words " en- 
durance," "courage," and the rest of the names of 
the traditional military virtues, do not at once call 
up to his mind anything of which he is especially 
conscious. For as a matter of fact a virtue is not 
something separate from the outer situation: it is 
simply the habit of meeting that situation well, and 
it will be the difficulty of the situation that the man 
will be most conscious of. So to the soldier, the 
tedium he suffers from time to time seems sim- 
ply tedium ; so pain is pain, and fatigue is fatigue, — 
bits of dismal experience to be met and lived through 
as best one may. It does not at once occur to him 
that the act of living through these things well is 
the " heroism," etc., that sounded so attractive in 
the auditorium. 

Hence if we are to describe the mind of the soldier 
in terms he is likely to recognize, it would be well 
to begin — as the realist does — by mentioning the 
things he has to contend with, — the physical grind 
and danger, the loss of personal freedom and distinc- 

*This is his De Profundis from the trenches: "I felt actually 
happy, for I was witnessing splendid, heroic things. It was an 
experience which gave one a new and unshakable faith in his fel- 
lows." "With Kitchener's Mob," page 167. 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 105 

tion, the inescapable consciousness of waste and 
ruin that deepens as time wears on, and withal a 
certain bleakness in the moral atmosphere, etc. It 
would be a false and unrecognizable psychology that 
should ignore these things; it would be an equally 
false psychology that should end with them, as if the 
mind were identical with the things it struggles 
against. 

The loss of his personal freedom is something 
the soldier never entirely ceases to feel, and its 
mental effects are far-reaching. In many ways, he 
has to unlearn the initiative of civil life, and to 
disuse the constant preoccupation of the independ- 
ent man — the making of plans for the morrow, and 
for the weeks and years ahead. There are few re- 
sponsible recruits to whom this check to the habit 
of planning one's actions does not come at first as 
a relief mingled with bewilderment ; it adds, in any 
case, a certain spice of adventure to existence. But 
in a free State, responsibility is of the very nature of 
maturity; and in a democratic army the impulses 
toward self-management and plan-making will find 
in a hundred ways new outlets, feeding on such 
knowledge as the soldier can raffle together. The 
critical humor, the incessant inquiring, speculating, 
and discussing on the part of the democratic soldier 
are due largely to his restless desire to feel himself 
master of his own destiny. This desire can never 
be wholly satisfied, even in civil life ; and its neces- 



106 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

sary repression in the army is but the rough side 
of the soldier's primary virtue of obedience. But 
meanwhile, anything that can add to his conscious- 
ness that the war is his war, and that he is co-re- 
sponsible for its outcome; anything that can make 
him more of a mental sharer in its ups and downs, 
in its geography, history, and aims; anything that 
can give him a definite province of his own, however 
limited, for initiative and invention, will both ma- 
terially aid the morale of the man as a soldier, and 
keep vigorous a quality invaluable for later civilian 
life. 

One important mental consequence of transfer- 
ring so much of his will to his commanders is that 
the thrust of his will is simplified and concentrated. 
In the mere shaping of the day's work, its goings 
and comings, its prescribed ways of turning around, 
of getting from one place to another, its times of 
waking up, eating, going to sleep, the labor of de- 
cision is greatly reduced. Having but one purpose to 
fulfill to the utmost, the whole stream of his interest 
can be directed to that; and he experiences, per- 
haps for the first time, the full value of having a 
mental attitude wholly definite and free from the 
many weighings, distractions, invitations, of ordi- 
nary existence. So far, the soldier is likely to be- 
come unified, categorical, direct, decisive, strong. He 
can deal in yeses and noes, in black and white in- 
stead of in half tones. The finality of will that 
marks the higher command — I am speaking of the 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 107 

armies in the field — penetrates the entire mentality 
of the force, and lends to the will of every soldier 
the power that comes only from the reduction of all 
issues to one — the defeat of the enemy. 

But this moral simplification, it is fair to note, is 
accompanied by a physical complication. For the 
soldier has everything to do, and the specialization 
of his civil career is largely undone. There are of 
course many specialties within the army, in the 
several branches of the service, in the company, the 
platoon, and even in the squad. But even so, the 
soldier must be a versatile animal, must know how 
to be his own bed-maker, barber, laundryman, and 
at times his own builder and cook, though billets 
normally relieve him of various of these functions. 
The most ancient of all divisions of labor, that be- 
tween the work of man and woman, is wiped out. 
The accomplished army engineer is the nearest sur- 
viving example of the jack-of-all-trades. In short, 
the life of the soldier has all the complications of an 
attempt at self-sufficiency. He must carry in his 
pack and kit-bag all the essential elements of civil- 
ization in portable form. The soldier, by necessity, 
becomes man generalized. 

Men who enter the army with a hearty spirit of 
ambition, whether from love of adventure or from 
eagerness to serve and to learn the technique of the 
new activity, may be hardly at all conscious at first 
either of the loss of freedom or of the rather crude 
and primitive conditions of camp life. They come 



108 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

with the expectation of being ordered about; and 
they know that some involuntary austerities are in 
store for them. Whatever is characteristic of army 
life has its keen interest just on that account. They 
are usually less aware of the hierarchy of official 
rank than of a very different hierarchy, — the supe- 
riority of the experienced man over the new man. 
There is, beside this new art of living a portable and 
all-around existence, an elaborate set of abbrevia- 
tions and signs, a new language to be learned: and 
one is less worried by the crudeness of ways and 
means than by his own greenness in making use 
of them. Soldierly ambition, in fact, is an almost 
perfect anesthetic for the minor trials incident to 
life in camp and field: and those officers who are 
skilled in securing a strong morale are those that 
take a high personal pride in the technique of their 
calling, and communicate it, in encouraging fashion, 
to their command. 

But it lies in the nature of the work of a soldier 
that not much is said about the ideals and sentiments 
that sustain his labor. Eeticence on such points is, 
in fact, one of the traditional military ideals. A 
man is supposed to have sufficient motive power 
within him, so that all attention can be given to the 
material business in hand. The moral atmosphere is 
rarefied; it is meant to be rarefied, — and correspond- 
ingly bracing. Thus arises one of the profound con- 
trasts that mark the existence of the soldier. 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 109 

For while his daily life is a sacrifice for an ideal 
— without which he is simply a man in misfortune ; 
while he is therefore more dependent than any civil- 
ian on idealism, if he is to keep his spirit alive ; he is 
more exposed than any other human being to the 
insistence of the material facts, and so to a sort of 
disillusion and fatalistic slump. The foreground 
of his life is apparently hard-headed, realistic, sor- 
did; the feelings and sentiments that were in evi- 
dence during the recruiting campaign have retired 
to the background. He finds himself summoned 
to ' ' pack up his troubles in the old kit-bag, ' ' and if 
he is wise he does so; but the philosophy of "smile" 
hardly meets all his requirements : he recognizes it 
for what it is, less a philosophy than a life-preserver. 
He is likely to get the impression that his ideals, 
and the people that talked of them, have somehow 
gone back on him. 

The impression is mistaken. But like every other 
man who undertakes a man's job, the soldier must 
go through his own struggle with this contrast be- 
tween the foreground and the background, and must 
find a way to keep his background alive within him- 
self. "What is necessary is that he should be able to 
think of himself, with his background, in a way that 
the foreground does not banish. We shall try to 
suggest such a way of picturing the case. 

It has sometimes aided me to put things into the 
right perspective to think of the soldier as the man 



110 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

who lives always at the frontier. The frontier of 
civilization is not a line that has kept moving west- 
ward until it has passed out of existence ; civiliza- 
tion is always in contact with its enemies, even with 
its beginnings. The foundations of the social order 
are not laid once for all in a remote past : as long as 
there are spots of disorder and chaos in the world, 
there are beginnings to be made. And here the 
soldier is always found. 

In times of peace, he is there, where great canals 
are being dug, or where forest-reserves are being 
warded, or where mountain roads are being built, 
or irrigation projects carried out, or where law and 
order have broken down. His task is to face origi- 
nal chaos and to create the beginnings of social life. 
And in times of war, he is still doing the same thing : 
the soldier is the perpetual pioneer. 

It is from this angle, I believe, that we can best 
judge how much the experience of the soldier may 
have to contribute to the mental equipment of the 
specialized and civilized man. If, as a pioneer, he 
takes part in the foundations of the State, he gets 
an understanding of the efforts of those that have 
built his society; he joins hands with them, and his 
mind stretches the gamut from origin to finished 
product with a new sense of mastery. His imagina- 
tion becomes adequate and responsible in proportion 
as he sees what it has cost to make a social order. 
He ceases to look on the virtues of the historical 
State-makers as strange, ancient, and inaccessible. 



PSYCHOLOGY OP THE SOLDIER 111 

He knows what is involved in building a state, for 
he himself is now one of the founders.* 

The soldier, then, is the man permanently at the 
frontier. But the character of the soldier only ap- 
pears when we add the reason for his being there. 
The reason is simply that the frontier is the place 
where the residual perils to society are to be found. 
The essential thing in the character of the soldier 
thus appears: he is the man who declines to take 
shelter from these perils at the cost of anybody else. 
This unwillingness to be the protected person, an 
expression of the one characteristic instinct of man- 
hood, seems to me to be the quality from which all 
the more particular military virtues are derived. 

This state of mind, declining to be sheltered by 
others, naturally links itself with many another mo- 
tive, — with whatever love of adventure and what- 
ever "desire for fear" (as Mr. Graham Wallas calls 
it) there is in a man's make up, with the temper 
which finds it intolerable that there is anything in 
the universe of which mankind must be lastingly 
afraid. It excites all the latent gaming spirit, and 

•This same view of the case should give us a means of judging 
the value of military training in times of peace. It can never be 
a matter of educational indifference to have an active share in 
the beginnings of the State. The attempt of a certain small part 
of civilian society to get "back to nature" during the summer 
months is evidence that, quite apart from the need for recreation, 
a psychological need for the pioneering role is felt; while the mani- 
fest absurdity of turning the entire population of the land to such 
an existence for any period of time, is evidence that the need in 
question is imperfectly understood or met. Naturally, having a 
sham share in pioneering is of no educational worth. Military 
drill without military labor becomes stale and unprofitable. But 
some union of the two may fill an educational gap. 



112 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

that curious artificial instinct which civilization cre- 
ates for the crude and raw, a symptom of the fact 
that our advances are not all advance. All these 
and many another strand of motive might be de- 
tected in the psychology of the soldier, which tend to 
cast a glamor over the rough sides of his experience 
— at least in retrospect. 

But whether or not one takes any organic satis- 
faction in the difficulties and perils of soldiering 
for their own sakes — and the time comes when the 
stoutest gets sick unto death of them — the virtue 
of the soldier is to go through with them willy nilly 
on the general principle that if there is anything 
that has to be stood, he can stand it. He is not 
going to let the other fellow stand it for him. 

There is an act of faith required in this state of 
mind; because one does not know in advance what 
he may have to go through. He has to face it in a 
sort of blanket-clause: he commits himself to 
"whatever is involved," on the assumption that 
what man has done man can do again, and probably 
more. And loyalty, which means holding to this 
commitment when things are at their worst, in- 
cludes the other traditional soldierly virtues, en- 
durance, severity, courage. 

For endurance means, There is nothing we can't 
stand if we have to. Severity means, There is 
nothing we can't do, if we have to, i. e., in the way 
of the killing deed. And courage means, There is 
nothing we can't face if we have to. 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 113 

Of courage we shall have more to say in the 
chapter on fear. But here a few words about sever- 
ity, of all these qualities least spoken of, and yet 
not the least necessary, nor the least difficult to 
acquire. The deed of killing is psychologically re- 
pellent to the majority of civilians. There is thought 
to be a "hunting instinct" in us, but comparatively 
few, in our day, develop it; and I venture to think 
that there are few to whom the occasional acts of 
minor surgery that come under the head of "heroic 
measures" do not cause a certain moral effort. The 
soldier has to achieve a disposition to kill, under 
the control of the knowledge that this deed has be- 
come his duty. To many civilians, this necessarily 
involves a "hardening" of the soldier's fiber; and 
some dare to use the word "brutalizing." The lat- 
ter would be fitly dealt with by being required to 
kill their own meat, or go without. Nothing that is 
a necessary duty can be intrinsically brutalizing. 
Neither is "hardening" the word, if by that is 
meant a loss of sensitiveness. It is usual, I believe, 
that in soldiers who have seen much fighting — and 
just on that account — the growth of sternness in the 
grim work of war goes with a deepening of tender- 
ness toward the people at home. Severity, I think, 
is the word for the normal effect of this requirement 
on character, a trait which implies an effort against 
one's own shrinking, one's misplaced tenderness and 
pity, as well as against the life of the enemy: it is 
the noble resolve to accept the disagreeable task, 



114 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

even the revolting task, if it is something that has 
to be done by somebody. 

There are those who profess to see in the psy- 
chology of the soldier, so far as he differs from his 
usual self, simply atavism, reversion toward the 
savage type. Primitive men, it seems, killed for 
the love of it : and in all of us, it is said, there lurks 
this murderous lust, to which only war gives free 
outlet. In this day of grace, it is given to few men 
except the soldier to "see red" in the original and 
literal sense of the phrase; and the experience, 
delirious and fearful, leaves its mark no doubt upon 
his memory, and his character. 

But what mark does it leave? The mark of the 
mind that went into action. In the passion of com- 
bat, the man becomes partly mechanized, works to a 
degree as an automaton, becomes so far insensitive 
to pain that operations without anesthetics have 
been performed (I have heard) on soldiers still 
under the spell of the fighting, without causing 
severe suffering:* He knows more or less vaguely 
that he is as it were merely the physical agent 
of himself, — that thought and deliberation are put 
away in the intense concentration of the physical 

# "Even the wounded refuse to abandon the struggle. As though 
possessed by devils, they fight on until they fall senseless from loss 
of blood. A surgeon in a front line post told me that at one mo- 
ment anesthetics ran out, owing to the impossibility of bringing 
forward fresh supplies through the bombardment. Arms, even legs, 
were amputated without a groan, and even afterward the men seemed 
hardly to have felt the shock." 

Despatch from Verdun, May 24, 1916. 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 115 

action.* It is the whole mind that gives the charac- 
ter to any action; and it is some time before the 
whole of that almost somnambulistic fighting mind 
can be reassembled. That whole mind has the qual- 
ity of the man's enduring purposes; and it would 
be absurd to speak of these as atavistic, — quite as 
much so to describe in these terms that moment of 
absorption in the frenzy of battle. 

I think it fair to judge that if events call us back 
at any time in history to the rude work of dealing 
with public crime, the event shows that there was 
something meretricious about our prior refinement, 
something over-protected and self-content. War is 
the calamity that reminds us that we have come to 
the details of our paradise too soon ; we were taking 
our ease before we had a full right to it. Thus war 
belongs to that mysterious side of life called ' ' earn- 
ing," an apportionment of effort to reward whose 
quantitative reason always escapes us, a tax which 
no human utopia-deviser would impose as the price 
for his enjoyments, and yet which instantly becomes 
the debt of honor of every man whence the demand 
is made. And perhaps we must remain capable 
for all time of the harsh as well as of the mild in 
our conduct. It is a poor microscope that is not 

•"It has often happened in war that some stubbornness in attack 
or defense has roused the same quality in the opposer, till the 
honor of the armies seems pledged to the taking or holding of one 
patch of ground perhaps not vital to the battle. It may be that in 
war one resolute soul can bind the excited minds of multitudes in 
a kind of bloody mesmerism; but these strange things are not stud- 
ied as they should be." 

John Masefield, Gallipoli, page 155. 



116 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

equipped with the coarser as well as with the finer 
adjustment ; for in fineness itself there is an element 
of restraint and confinement. Without an echo of 
severity, as of a force held in distant reserve, some- 
thing of the masculine character seems lacking, 
whether in war or in peace. 

The qualities so far mentioned have been defined 
in negative terms, because they are the bottom qual- 
ities which a man must fall back upon when he is 
nearing his limit. Under ordinary circumstances, 
however, the "decliner of shelter" wears a lighter 
mask. Endurance is covered over by cheerfulness, 
and cheerfulness in turn by a superficial freedom 
in "grousing" which implies that there is nothing 
too serious going on, and so no reason for not say- 
ing what comes into one's head. Severity and cour- 
age are commonly covered over in the same way — 
according to taste — by a certain hardness or non- 
chalence of demeanor and language, which, like 
the callouses on a much-used hand, are assumed to 
fit the environment. And just as the assumed cheer- 
fulness loses its value in time, and dies a natural 
death, so an assumed huskiness, aggressiveness, 
bravado, or coarseness of manner give way in time 
to a simpler, quieter, and franker dealing with things 
as they come. 

Perhaps the finest things in the temper of the 
soldier are these later qualities that only come with 
experience, — steadiness, absence of pretense, and 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 117 

the firm undemonstrative readiness for whatever 
may happen next. I know of no single name for 
these qualities, unless it is the word "reality." In 
it, the psychology of the soldier joins with that of 
the man everywhere who has learned to worship the 
god of things as they are. He has made his mental 
detour, passed through the stage of special character 
and contrast to the civilian mind, and has returned 
to his natural self. It is perhaps only a few who 
complete the circuit; but those who are genuinely 
"first in war" are ready without another reversal 
of character to become the "first in peace." War 
has been their path to wholeness. 

In describing "the soul of the soldier," Lieuten- 
ant Morize of the first French Military Mission to 
this country, said, i * To my thinking, that means for 
you two things, — the spirit of sacrifice and the spirit 
of discipline." The "spirit of sacrifice" may be 
taken as another name for the qualities we have been 
discussing. The "spirit of discipline" is a chapter 
by itself. 



CHAPTER XI 

DISCIPLINE AND DBILL 

The mental unity of an army is no easy incident of 
being "with one accord in one place." It is a result 
to be purchased at a great price. To make of a 
million men an instrument with which a commander 
can do what he will is a modern miracle, to be un- 
derstood only by a long history of the art of com- 
bining the smaller groups, and of finding the simple 
operations which can best serve as the units for all 
the actions of that composite monster, the army. 
To anyone who witnesses the ease and speed with 
which a forty-acre field may blossom out into a 
great camp of shelter tents, and with which this 
same camp may dissolve again into the forty-acre 
field, the process may seem a simple one ; but it has 
had to be built up by inches, and by a hundred fit- 
tings of one man's act into the act of his neighbor. 
Yet this is, in fact, one of the simplest of the deeds 
of a military unit and certainly one least liable to 
distraction. 

When one considers that the invitations to con- 
fusion under which the serious business of an army 
is done are no ordinary disturbances, but such as 
take deepest hold on human instincts, he begins to 

118 



DISCIPLINE AND DKILL 119 

measure the amount of strain which discipline must 
be able to bear without breaking. A newly acquired 
habit must be set against the most masterful im- 
pulses ; and must, at times, be able to take the place 
of thought and will themselves. 

In discipline there are two elements which it is 
hard for men of American mould to accept. The one 
is the loss of personal freedom and distinction of 
which we have spoken. The other is the arbitrary 
stress that is laid on doing details just so rather 
than otherwise, when an active and inventive reason 
suggests many an alternative and perhaps better 
way. There is no a priori reason why a campaign 
hat should go with one kind of bodygear and a cap 
with another. Neither is there any reason why one 
should turn to the right rather than to the left in 
passing; but there is every reason for adopting 
some rule, arbitrarily if necessary, and making it 
uniform. Hence the pressure of the arbitrary is 
everywhere in the early stages of army education. 

It is not, indeed, nearly so pervasive as one is 
first tempted to think. Behind the concise dicta of 
the Infantry Drill Regulations there is a mine of 
experience in the multitude of wrong ways of doing 
things ; and the best drillmasters make some of this 
wisdom apparent as they harp on the required 
methods of execution. But it would seem to me one 
of the most useful contributions of military training 
to the general art of living in a democracy if it could 
ingrain the idea of the necessary consent to some 



120 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

arbitrary basis of action involved in carrying out 
every common purpose. 

Before any gathering can take place, a meeting- 
point must be set — if need be by arbitrary decision. 
Before a race can be run or a game played, the goal 
posts must be placed, and the placing will require 
some other faculty than pure reason. I am inclined 
to think that the finer points of character and prin- 
ciple grow up about some more or less arbitrary 
self-requirement. If a battalion on being relieved 
after six mortal days in the trenches marches to 
its billets at attention, it is giving the last unneces- 
sary touch of perfection to its work, but in a way 
that means much to morale; for it asserts what 
every man wants to believe of his deed, "we did it 
with a margin." Discipline means subjection; but 
not subjection to officers. It means subjection of 
the body to the mind; it means the superiority of 
the human spirit to the last efforts of wind and 
weather, and the demons of fear, pain, and fatigue. 
It is the element of Stoicism without which no man 
can do his living well. 

During the opening years of the war, we heard 
a great deal about the changed conditions of war- 
fare. The technique of the trenches seemed to ren- 
der all traditional tactics obsolete, and especially to 
throw close-order drill into relative unimportance. 
Digging-in, bomb-throwing, sniping, bayonet-prac- 
tice, etc. — these arts had risen to the first magni- 



DISCIPLINE AND DBILL 121 

tude : ' ' On right into line ' ' and even ' ' Squads right' ' 
appeared ornamental rather than useful accomplish- 
ments. 

So it seemed also to the first contingents from 
the British provinces. And when the Guards regi- 
ments of London, the be-plumed and be-buttoned 
admiration of the London streets, entrained for the 
front, there was much shrewd comment to the effect 
that they would shine less gloriously in the rude 
conditions of trench warfare, less gloriously than 
the rough-and-ready fighters at their sides. 

The prophets were wrong. The Guards continued 
to shine, and to outshine. The rough-and-readies 
lacked nothing in spirit, but they suffered fright- 
fully through inaccuracies, through overreaching, 
through running into their own barrage, through 
carelessness in details. All of the training camps, 
in the provinces and elsewhere, changed their minds. 
Wherever opportunity offered, at the front, at 
Etaples, at Aldershot, I asked the question and re- 
ceived the same answer. " Whatever you Ameri- 
cans do, give us men who have the elements of dis- 
cipline, the close-order drill. If they lack in the 
field work, we can make that good over here; but 
nothing can make up for weakness in the drill. ' ' 

What is the explanation? It lies partly in the 
enormous difficulties of perfect team-work among 
large numbers of men under any conditions, and 
partly in the phenomenal capacity of the human 
mind for careless and inaccurate workmanship, in 



122 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

which we of America certainly hold a high place.* 
As in the case of other new lands, we have won a 
certain level of result easily: we have not had to 
count the farthings, nor to measure our farms by 
the square foot. Informality has been one of our 
ideals ; and it has a rare distinction among ideals, — 
we have achieved it. We have gained a freedom 
from red tape, a directness of fitting means to ends, 
a deliverance from the worship of insignia and plum- 
age, which are integral parts of our democracy and 
which have shown their worth too often to be given 
up. At the same time, however, a certain slackness 
has leaked in, a toleration of incompetence, and a 
forgetting of the value, the meaning, the positive en- 
joyment of good form. 

I say the enjoyment of good form, because I doubt 
whether there is any human being who does not take 
pleasure in a maneuver, or any other bit of work- 
manship, done with skill and accuracy. But the 
case for discipline does not rest on the enjoyment 
of the finished result : it rests on its practical value, 
and on its meaning. 

The practical value of discipline is largely a mat- 

*As an example, those who have the happy task of instructing 
cadet officers will appreciate the following set of replies which 
came to me in an examination in which the men were asked to 
describe the position of the soldier — naturally not all from one 
man: 

"Heels together and pointing outward, making an angle of 45 
degrees ; 

"Hips in, as nearly as the conformation of the man permits; 

"Body placed squarely on the hips; 

"Shoulders straight, drawn back, and arched; 

-'The chin and eyes remain on an axis of 90 degrees from the neck." 



DISCIPLINE AND DRILL 123 

ter of psychology. The more intently men learn to 
observe each others' movements, to listen to the 
words of command, and to accommodate themselves 
to the doings of the unit they are with, the more 
fit they are for team work of any kind, the more 
they form the habit of feeling themselves a unit. 
The insistent practice of a few unit-operations until 
they retire into subconsciousness and become me- 
chanical, allows the mind to be free and to think of 
the total formation. Freeing the mind is the func- 
tion of all technique : no one who has to think of 
the individual placing of his fingers can be a pianist. 
It is a necessity, not a luxury, for a commanding 
officer to be able to think of his command as a unit, 
to handle it as a unit, — which can only be the case 
if it has mentally grown together into unity. Army- 
making is a process of mental grafting; and this 
can only be achieved by training attention until 
each man's mind is rooted into the mind of his 
neighbors, not by his separate conscious efforts, 
but by great subconscious blocks of habit. 

Quite apart from this is the practical value of 
doing some one thing to perfection. Some mental 
habits spread faster than others : a boy who studies 
mathematics and hates it will gain very few mental 
virtues that can be used on other things. But a 
man who can do the manual to the point of taking 
pride in it has a mental interest in perfection that 
will spread to other things, by degrees. It may take 
a little pedagogical skill on the part of the officer 



124 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

to make it spread, an occasional "Do this as you do 
your ' Right shoulder, arms, ' ' ' but it is a permanent 
resource, a high point in morale to which other 
points can be levelled up. 

It marks, among other things, the high point of 
obedience; for in a body of men at drill the response 
to the word of command becomes as automatic as 
the response of the body to the will. All command- 
ers make instinctive use of the attitude of attention 
for communicating orders and instructions of im- 
portance : for this attitude forms the sluiceway down 
which the disposition of obedience is communicated 
from the drill-head, so to speak, to the outlying por- 
tions of the day's duty. And many a commander 
has found, in practical experience, that troops get- 
ting slightly out of hand for any reason may be 
restored to control by the call to attention, and the 
repetition of a few of the well-known formations 
of close order. 

It is sometimes felt that just this element of obe- 
dience has something in it contrary to the spirit 
of free man ; that however valuable or necessary it 
may be for purposes of war-making it is oppressive 
and damaging to the individual; and that America, 
for this reason, should always fight shy of the train- 
ing to arms, which cannot be separated from train- 
ing to an undue subordination. There is a very 
simple answer to this scruple from a psychological 
law of habit, which deserves to be better known. 

The law is this: that the habit which is formed 



DISCIPLINE AND DRILL 125 

by any act or series of acts depends on the motive 
of the act more than on the external shape of it. >. 

For instance, a solicitor for some charity comes 
into my office and asks for a subscription. If I 
make a subscription, what habit am I forming? No- 
body can answer unless he knows why I do it. If 
I do it because I see everybody else is doing it and 
I don't want to be out of line, I am forming the 
habit of social imitation, not of charity. If I do it 
because I want to impress somebody who happens 
to be in the office at the time, I am forming the habit 
of pretense. If I do it to get rid of the solicitor, 
the habit of evasion. The habit-forming power of 
any act is determined from inside, not from outside._^/ 

For this reason the obedience of a free man, who 
is a consenting party to the relation of obedience, 
will never form the same habit as the obedience of a 
man who acts from fear. It would be impossible to 
Prussianize America, even with the same system of 
compulsory service ; for the obedience of the Amer- 
ican would never have the same inner stamp.* It 
is as foolish to suppose that universal service would 
mechanize and subdue the spirits of Americans as 

*There is also a difference in methods of discipline, which is well 
brought out by Major General William A. Pew, in his capital little 
book on "Making a Soldier": 

"We can follow the lead of the old Prussian model, or that of 
West Point. What I call the old Prussian model was described 
by Marshal Saxe when he declared that soldiers should be machines 
animated only by the voice of their commander. There is one 
drawback to this system. When men are trained into machines, 
they become subject to the limitations of machines. The West Point 
method tries to make good where the old Prussian system runs the 
risk of failure. The cadets are put through a novel type of efficiency 
calisthenics. Major Koehler in his drills gives any descriptive order 



126 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

to suppose that voluntary working for wages has 
that effect. If the war should drag on for a long 
series of years, there would be a real danger from 
the slow enfeeblement of the larger powers of per- 
sonal initiative involved in plan-making, but not 
from the relation of obedience. As a nation we 
stand to gain a great deal from the development of 
alert and careful attention to directions, and exacti- 
tude in executing them. In the Special Training De- 
tachments, in which technical training is carried on 
side by side with military drill, there is a practi- 
cally unanimous testimony on the part of the tech- 
nical instructors that the work is improved both in 
quality and in speed by its association with the mil- 
itary ideal.* The men bring to their carpentry, 
sheet metal work, lathe-work, electric wiring, etc., 
the mental atmosphere of attention and "pep." 

It goes without saying that if discipline is to have 
any value for the individual subject to it, the rules, 
orders, and commands to which he submits his will, 
must be, on the whole, wise. In the special discipline 
of drill or technique this question does not arise : the 
more perfectly one has mastered the unit operations, 
the fitter he is to carry out any general order which 
employs them, be that order wise or foolish. But the 

that comes into his head. He may say, 'Right hand on hip,' 'Left 
hand on nose,' or anything else. The cadets have to keep awake. 
The West Point idea of subordination is not the unintelligent re- 
sponse of a machine, but the loyal support of an active mind, whicn 
grasps the purpose of a commander and strives to advance it with 
force and energy." Pages 51-53. 

•Which may be dependent on the presence of a real war to give 
these drill exercises their value. I do not prejudge this question. 



DISCIPLINE AND DRILL 127 

wider discipline of obedience to the general control 
of army authority is another matter, and its value 
is more conditional. If men are at odds with the 
general spirit or management of things; if they 
chafe under their rules or hate their rulers — whether 
the fault is in the rules or in the commanders or in 
themselves, the regime may bring out the worst in 
them rather than the best. External discipline, held 
in place by a vista of punishment, develops chiefly 
the powers of deception and evasion ; makes adepts 
at beating the rules, and turns the times of freedom 
and furlough into times of kicking over the traces. 
And this will be to some extent the tendency of every 
system which pretends to a greater measure of in- 
fallibility than it actually possesses, or which as- 
sumes a "military" finality of form which it cannot 
make good in substance. 

But in a democratic army these dangers are at a 
minimum ; the absolute theory of command is every- 
where subordinated to the human equation ; author- 
ity has learned that it must be built on confidence 
and good- will, that the obedience of the spirit is 
something which commanders have to earn. 

I have spoken of the practical value of discipline. 
I wish to add a few words regarding its meaning. 

There is a great contrast between the parade 
ground and the trenches; and it is sometimes felt 
that the soldier of the parade ground has vanished 
when the soldier of the trenches takes his place. 



128 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

This is very far from being the case. For one of 
the most genuine needs of the man under harsh, 
racking, destable conditions is for what I will call 
a "self of reference," — that is, a state of mind 
which he can remember as being normal, even 
though he cannot attain it. We live more than we 
realize upon what we can hark back to: we forget 
our mathematical proofs, but we remember the self 
that knew them ; we slip away from our best insights, 
but we remember and respect the self that had 
them. The soldier in mortal difficulty will have no 
more valuable asset than the memory of his own 
parade-ground self, as the being who foresaw just 
these perils, but in the large only, and so in a 
sounder and more normal proportion. 

But this self of reference does not come into be- 
ing of itself: it has to be built. It is rather mis- 
leading to speak of the parade-ground self, or any 
other feature of discipline, as having a meaning. 
Like other elements of ceremony, they have only 
the meaning that is put into them. An act of formal 
courtesy, a handshake, a bow, may mean anything 
or nothing ; likewise, a military salute. But all such 
formalities are capable of being taken as symbols; 
and it is worth while to consider them in that light. 

It is notable that the life of the soldier, a constant 
tussle with the most literal of literal facts, should 
be so full of symbols, many of them relics of ancient 
usages. The "present arms" and "parade rest," 
the position of "attention," the uniform itself, the 



DISCIPLINE AND DBILL 129 

insignia, the flag, the bugle calls, all the curious dis- 
tinctive elements of military language, parade, and 
review, are like so many signs manual of the most 
ancient of all fraternities, one more conservative of 
its rites, sentiments, and customs than the law. This 
fact is of itself a powerful evidence of the psycho- 
logical value of these symbols. 

The history of an observance does not determine 
its present meaning: though it may add to the in- 
terest of the hand salute to regard it as a relic of 
the practice of lifting the visor to an honored knight 
in the days of tourney. The meaning of a saluta- 
tion must grow out of present conditions ; the salute 
should mean a sign of respect to the will of a nation, 
embodied in an individual figure. If to any man it 
means a sign of subordination to a person, it can 
only be because he had so interpreted it himself. 
The salute should be understood as a recognition of 
the tie between the individual giving the salute and 
the organism of the army, whatever that may mean 
for him. And if such meaning is once made clear, 
the repetition of the symbol — for the most part 
without any explicit thought of its meaning — will 
still tend to solidify in subconsciousness the senti- 
ment it signifies. 

Few human traditions are richer in fine symbols 
than the army. There are few ceremonies so ade- 
quate as that act of reverence in which officers and 
men together salute the flag at " retreat." And 
there are few notes of music that can convey so 



130 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

much as the bugle-song of "taps" at the close of a 
soldier's day, or of a soldier's life. 

Such elements of discipline are at the same time 
elements of art, and follow the laws of art. They 
may be perfunctory and vapid: they may be capi- 
talized, enriched by daily deposit. An officer can 
do much to fill or empty a given bit of ceremony for 
his men. A man may fill or empty it for himself. 
But whatever is put into such forms will be returned 
with interest. They become stabilizers, ways of es- 
cape from the ups and downs of feeling, ways of 
tacit access to the elusive background of meaning 
and to the ' ' self of reference ' ' therewith. It is fair 
to say that for one's own sake it is impossible to do 
one's formalities too well. 



CHAPTER XII 

prestige: the psychology of command 

If there is a psychological transformation when a 
man puts on the uniform, there is another, not less 
profound, when he gets his first chevrons and gives 
his first command. Sometimes I think that the 
critical moment in a soldier's career is the moment 
when he first acts as corporal of his squad. Those 
who say that it is hard for an American to take 
orders may not realize that it is equally hard for 
the average American to give them. The art of 
command is an art by itself. 

The reasons for this difficulty are various. The 
main one, I believe, is this: that while the experi- 
enced commander forgets his own special person- 
ality, and uses quite naturally the voice and author- 
ity of the organization, the raw commander is con- 
scious of his individual self, and consequently real- 
izes that the words falling out of his mouth have 
hardly the weight that should make men obey them. 
The relation of command and obedience is not a 
relation between two individuals: a third and in- 
visible party to the situation is always present — the 
authority of the State and army — and unless this 
third member is at home in the group, the business 
of commanding will be a little forced and thin. 

131 



132 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

There are other reasons which apply more espe- 
cially to the American, trained in a tradition of 
equality which makes him instinctively feel the posi- 
tion of commander as a peculiarly exposed posi- 
tion. Dignity and assertiveness are perhaps not 
his strong leads. He knows he has to face, not so 
much the surly criticism as the more searching hu- 
mor of his men ; he has still to learn his individual 
variation on the one word which must never, in the 
army, be pronounced as it is spelled: ''March." 
'He needs the manner which only experience can 
justify, the manner of confidence, authority, pres- 
tige. 

The embarrassment of assuming command is, in 
fact, but the counterpart of the embarrassment of 
obedience: both are due to a false idea of individ- 
ualism which forgets the third party in the situa- 
tion. But there is no doubt a natural psychological 
difficulty in beginning the role of commander (to 
all but the unduly rich in self-assurance, who never 
make good officers), a difficulty which gives rise to 
something like a superstition about the "born lead- 
ers." A theory of "prestige" springs up as of an 
innate quality akin to genius, which, once for all, 
some men have and other men are hopelessly with- 
out. 

The legends of Napoleon have done much to en- 
force the idea that there is something uncanny about 
leadership, as if the awe which great leaders un- 
questionably evoke were due to something more 



prestige: the psychology of command 133 

than the greatness conferred upon them by men's 
inveterate need to idealize and admire. 

Major Eltinge regards prestige in this way as a 
unique quality, and surrounds it with a certain air 
of mystery. "Prestige," he says, "causes the ac- 
ceptance of an idea without discussion or contro- 
versy . . . the suggestion is received from the out- 
set, and appears most logical and true in the eyes of 
all. Orders given under these conditions partake 
of a peculiar force ; and it may be said that the best 
obeyed commanders are neither the best instructed, 
the most intelligent, the most paternal, nor the most 
severe, but are those that have innate or acquired 
prestige." 

Where does this leave us? Rather helpless in 
cultivating this quality, which we are told ' ' must be 
the dominating quality in a leader of men. ' ' There 
can be no doubt, I think, that some men are en- 
dowed more highly than others with the disposition 
to "boss" others, and with the natural bearing of 
command. Many begin the practice in the cradle, 
and have to have some of the disposition extracted. 
But I believe no normal human being is without it ; 
an4 that the germs of it are capable of analysis, 
and so of development. Let me mention what seem 
to me the chief ingredients of prestige. 

1. Concentration of purpose. Respect involun- 
tarily goes to the man who respects his own work, 
especially if he is so much absorbed in it as to for- 



134 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

get his own private self and convenience at the de- 
mand of the job. Men take subconscious note of 
what their officers prize, and of what these officers 
ignore. They are never deceived about what their 
commander is putting first in his scale of impor- 
tance. They do not expect him always to put their 
comfort before his own; — though the paternal ele- 
ment which makes for affection will add to prestige 
if the other elements be present: but they know at 
once whether he puts his ease above his duty, and 
they know also whether his duty is a grind to him or 
a thing he relishes and tries to grow up to. It is 
only the latter man that can hope for prestige. The 
foundation stone in the Napoleonic psychology, as 
I see it, was an absorbing passion for the art of war. 

2. Competence. A quality which almost always 
follows from the first, but not always. It implies 
painstaking forethought so that one is not caught at 
a loss for information, nor taken by surprise. It is 
forethought which enables a man to be the source 
of knowledge to those about him ; and one can hardly 
have prestige who leans habitually on others for 
his facts. It is forethought again which lays the 
foundation for prompt decision and resolute action ; 
and one can hardly have prestige who falters and 
vacillates, and therefore fails. 

Failure does not destroy prestige, when it is 
plainly not due to incompetence : the retreat of 1914 
left many a leader on the side of France and Eng- 
land stronger with his men than before — Joff re and 



prestige: the psychology of command 135 

Foch among them.* But a few simple successes due 
to plain forethought will create the tradition of 
success which is half the battle of prestige. 

One need hardly assume in the personality of 
great commanders any other native trait than that 
of surpassing competence, with the acquired ability 
to think as quickly and firmly in public as in solitude, 
and in emergency as in leisure. 

3. Honesty and generosity. The man who cares 
so much for prestige that he will not admit a mistake 
is sure to lose it. No man becomes strong with his 
followers by belittling their insight in order to 
fortify the contrast between them and himself: the 
great leader is one who makes his associates great, 
and gives them rather more than due credit for any 
wisdom they possess. It is safe to say that no one 
can acquire prestige who worries about it, and more 
particularly if he tries to build it on ' bluff. ' 

One bit of bluff is perhaps allowable, namely, that 
of keeping out of sight any disturbance you may feel 
in an emergency. But even here, the best way to get 
rid of excitement, oftentimes, is to blow it off rather 
than bottle it up. For when you try to surpress it 

# Stephane Lauzanne explains the victory of the Marne partly by 
generalship, and partly by the morale of the troops, "armies which 
without exception had kept intact their fighting spirit, that is, 
their faith in themselves, in their leaders, in the destiny of their 
country, in the beauty of the cause for which they fought. 

"I remember asking many of the officers attached to the forces 
which after the battle of Charleroi retreated under a broiling sun 
along roads burning with heat through a suffocating dust, how they 
felt at that disheartening time. 'We did not know where we were 
going nor what we were doing, but we did know one thing, — that 
we would beat them.' " 



136 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

you show to yourself a sort of fear of your own 
emotion. 

It is also a concession to human nature to transfer 
an officer from the command in which he has made 
his maiden mistakes to one in which he can act with 
the advantage of the unknown, receiving the benefit 
of all doubts. But here again, a man of genuine 
candor and strength of character has no need of 
this artifice. The surest basis for prestige is the 
assumption that one is certain to be known, sooner 
or later, for what one is. 

4. Dignity and symbolism of behavior. There is 
no doubt that much of the quality of prestige lies 
in the manner, the decision of gesture, the unflinch- 
ing expectation of being obeyed. It is also true that 
these qualities cannot be laid on by mere dint of will. 
It is they, perhaps, which chiefly give rise to the 
superstition regarding prestige. But it is they 
which naturally follow, as the outward expression 
of the qualities above mentioned. 

Dignity comes from seeing things in their right 
proportion. It has no opposition to fun and com- 
radeship with the men. In the etiquette of all 
armies, some barriers are placed which prevent 
undue familiarity of officers with men ; but there are 
no barriers to an open human relationship, and to 
humor. The test of dignity is not stiffness or 
haughtiness, but elasticity, — the power of making a 
quick transition from fun to business, and of carry- 
ing your men with you. 



prestige: the psychology of command 137 

But dignity of behavior is not enough without the 
second quality above mentioned, — symbolism. This 
implies first of all, that the officer's words and 
gestures should not alone tell what is to be done, 
but suggest also the spirit of doing it. If you expect 
commands to be executed with snap and vigor, this 
quality must precede, in the tone and attitude with 
which you give the command. And symbolism im- 
plies, besides this, that the action of a man is an 
index to his habitual thinking. Gestures express 
the subconscious parts of the mind ; they reveal what 
words cannot, the mental region in which a man 
lives. If he is seeing the horizons of his own office, 
and is filled with the meaning and issues of the 
campaign, these things will make themselves felt, 
involuntarily, in his manner. The symbolism which 
in the ritual of the army is concentrated in the occa- 
sional ceremonies will be constantly present in his 
actions ; without any effort on his part, his carriage 
will be itself a ceremony, individual and natural. 

In choosing its officers for their personal quali- 
fications, the army does not leave them to work out 
the problem of command unaided: it supplies them 
with some nest-egg of original capital in the way 
of the dignity and symbolism that enter into pres- 
tige. By the insignia of rank, by making them the 
channel of information to the men, by supplying 
them with special knowledge about situations and 
plans, by backing their native authority with the 
whole weight of its will, its punishments and re- 



138 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

wards, it does all that an external power could do 
to mount and equip the officer's own power. 

The army creates the office; it cannot create the 
man. Prestige can only result when the trappings 
and powers of office fit the man like a natural gar- 
ment because he has grown into them. The officer 
who falls back on his office, has frequently to invoke 
its authority and punishments, is not on the way to 
prestige: for this can come only when he is trans- 
parent, so to speak, to the office, feeling no distinc- 
tion between it and himself, and so suggesting none. 
Then, he gives an order without the shadow of sug- 
gestion that it might be disobeyed: and his abso- 
lute expectation of obedience becomes a powerful 
factor in bringing about the reality. 

In reaching this state of mind in which authorita- 
tiveness has become second nature, there is no sub- 
stitute for experience. It is natural that in a thou- 
sand matters of judgment, of how much and how 
little to require, only the seasoned officer can have 
the true intuition which gives simplicity and cer- 
tainty in command. The beginner will at times be 
too severe for fear of being too lenient, and at others 
too lenient for fear of being too severe. It is in 
human nature I will not say to stand, but to prefer, 
being held to rigorous standards, — but only on one 
condition : that beneath the iron will there is known 
to be a complete knowledge and consideration of the 
limits of the human organism. As long as obedience 



prestige: the psychology of command 139 

is an act of confidence which commits vital interests 
into the hands of officers, command must be an act 
of thorough responsibility ; and a large, though un- 
scheduled, part of the life of an army consists in 
the gradual education of the officers by the privates, 
through their spontaneous reactions. Hence there 
is not, and there ought not to be, prestige apart from 
experience, none like that of the man who has been 
tested and has made good, who knows his instru- 
ment, and is fortified against miscalculation. 

In his account of experiences as a dragoon at the 
beginning of the war, Christian Mallett tells of a 
speech by General Foch to the officers of his unit: 

" Listening to the General was like experiencing 
a species of shock. He hammered out his words and 
scanned his phrases in a manner which made us 
feel ill at ease. His speech was a flagellation, and 
we felt a sort of moral abaissement as a result of it. 
His look seized us and held us. 

1 ' First he spoke to us of our mission, of the utility 
of training the men in view of the coming fatigues : 

" 'Train their arms, train their legs, train their 
muscles, train their backs. You possess fine quali- 
ties: draw on them from the soles of your feet if 
necessary but get them into your heads. I have no 
use for people who are said to be animated by good 
intentions. Good intentions are not enough. I want 
people who are determined to get there, and who 
do.' 

" There are shreds of his phrases that remain 
graven upon my memory, curt short phrases, punc- 



140 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

tuated by a sharp gesture, or by an indescribable 
look of the eye : 

" 'If you want to overturn that wall, don't blunt 
your bayonet point on it; what is necessary is to 
break it, shatter it, overturn it, stamp on it, and 
walk over the ruins, for we are going to walk over 
ruins. If we have not done so already . . . (and 
here he suddenly lowered his voice, and gave it an 
intonation almost mysterious) it is because we were 
not ready. We lacked explosives, bombs, grenades, 
minnewerfers, which we now have. And we are 
going to strike : for we have a stock such as you can- 
not even have an idea of. We are going to swamp 
the enemy, strike him everywhere at once, — in his 
defenses, in his morale, — harass him, madden him, 
crush him. We will march over nothing but ruins. ' 

"Then he went off quite naturally, without any 
theatrical effect. He said just what he had to say, 
and he did not say a word too many. He saluted us : 

" 'I hope, gentlemen, to have the honor of seeing 
you again.' 

1 ' A moment later his motor car was carrying him 
off." 

In this account, all the above-mentioned qualities 
are exemplified, and in addition the quality which is 
at the basis of all of them, invincible resolution, that 
undismayable, undefeatable determination to win, 
founded on a grasp of the situation capable of pull- 
ing victory out of apparent disaster, that could well 
come to men of less force as "a species of shock." 
Such a man through his eye, through his voice, 
through his gesture, through the substance of what 



prestige: the psychology of command 141 

he says, through an absorption in his work and a 
belief in his mission, — homely qualities rising to the 
point of genius — can infuse his own state of mind 
and will into his men and magnify them. 

Mr. Yeats has denned genius as the deliberate 
choice of living with the major issues of life. The 
simple and poor of the world live with these major 
issues, — life and death, fortune and misfortune, dan- 
gers and hazards of all sorts, — not by choice but by 
necessity; and men of genius often prefer to find 
their associates among them (Mr. Yeats was think- 
ing of Synge at the time) because they find their 
proper interests there. Whether or not this is true 
of other kinds of genius, it may be taken as giving 
a helpful light upon military genius, — for this too 
might be described as the deliberate preference of 
living with the major issues. And this is certainly 
the secret of prestige, so far as it has a secret: it 
is, as we said, a kind of transparency of a man to 
that greater thing, the will of army and nation, 
which visibly is working through his agency. With 
this understanding of prestige and of genius, 
we can readily agree that prestige is a matter of 
genius. But it is not out of the reach of any officer 
who has the capacity to desire it, and the moral 
courage to pay its price. 



CHAPTER XIII 

MOKALE-BUILDING FACTORS 

We have spoken of the qualities which constitute 
morale in officers and men. We have so far said lit- 
tle of the chief enemies of morale which the soldier 
has to meet, especially of fear, because we wish to 
speak of them more fully by themselves. But before 
doing this, let me bring together here for summary 
view, the various factors that help to build morale, 
several of which have already been incidentally 
mentioned. 

Certain of these factors are mechanical; they 
affect morale automatically without requiring sepa- 
rate attention. Anyone who has watched a group 
of recruits go through the early stages of training 
until they are reasonably skilled in the close-order 
work will have seen that changes are taking place in 
their mental attitude at the same time. I shall begin 
with these automatic influences, and first of all, the 
simple lapse of time. 

1. Time. The average raw recruit is a bundle of 
ignorance and corresponding embarrassment if not 
dismay, regarding the ways of war. Time answers 
his questions, gives him self-confidence, reassures 
him regarding the disposition of the world of neces- 
sity that surrounds him. He has come with the 

142 



MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 143 

ragged strands of broken-off interests badgering his 
mind : the new business has as yet little if any hold 
on his fancy. Time reverses the situation: the 
former interests heal over — unless there is some- 
thing at home that keeps them sore — and the new 
interests acquire warmth and actuality of them- 
selves. Time gives back the mental bearings, the 
new points of reference for mental comings and 
goings, which were momentarily lost in the days of 
transition. 

2. Physical condition. All purposes and habits 
have a twofold base, physical and mental : and each 
of these two sides affects the other. The lethargic 
body has fears and dreads that the sound body is 
free from. Apathy is largely a compound of sub- 
conscious shrinkings from hardship and subcon- 
scious fears, which generate an equally subconscious 
wish that by some lucky accident the brunt of 
things would fall — anywhere else than on number 
one. These shrinkings are largely due to physical 
softness and unfitness. 

We have to bear in mind that morale, as a state 
of readiness to act, requires an alertness and con- 
fidence in one's powers of action. " Self-reliance," 
says an army manual, "is after all a physical qual- 
ity, as it induces men to dare, because of the con- 
sciousness of ability to do." I dare say that there 
is something more in self-reliance than the physical 
ability; but certain it is that lazy muscles and slug- 
gish blood and half-good digestion with half-good 



144 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

sleep are no fit soil for purposes to grow in that 
promise effort and pain. 

Conversely, physical fitness changes the whole 
mental attitude. Generous willingness to assume 
the troubles of others as well as one's own is pos- 
sible only to those who have margins of energy. 
The primary enemy of morale is not pessimism, it is 
plain apathy or indifference; and the conditions of 
camp life, especially with an abundance of athletics 
in the form of vigorous and aggressive games, box- 
ing, etc., are such that indifference, feebleness of 
spirit, self-centeredness, without much attention, die 
a natural death. 

3. Skill. Ability to do a thing generates a wish 
to do it. This is true of skill with rifle and bayonet 
as well as of skill with the instruments of peace : it 
is as true of tactical and strategic ability as it is of 
political ability. It has been recognized as one of 
the dangers of highly trained military establish- 
ments in time of peace: the German army having 
been brought to an almost imperative sense of 
ability, a huge restless impulse to go to arms per- 
vaded the nation, — that "tramping, drilling foolery 
at the heart of Europe,'' as Mr. Wells described it, 
aching to set itself in motion. There is plenty to 
offset this wish in the wiser military heads; our 
own army has never been an irritant toward war. 
But given the war, the same impulsive quality of 
conscious skill becomes one of the primary assets 
of morale. 



MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 145 

4. Authority of the environment. The spirit of 
the army will work its way through the skin of the 
recruit without any effort on the army's part. Men 
who live much together differ not less widely in 
opinions, etc., than men who live apart; but in the 
undiscussed things they acquire insensibly a com- 
mon outlook. The purposes that are in the air, and 
are taken more or less for granted, seize upon 
them. Especially, the presence of officers whom the 
men have learned to respect, who have the prestige 
we were lately speaking of, gradually makes the 
whole detachment over into their likeness. Assum- 
ing that there are no mental hangings-back which 
prevent this factor from having its full effect, I 
should judge this natural self-propagation of the 
spirit of the group and of its leaders to be the great- 
est single factor in the making of morale. A train- 
ing detachment seldom fails to take on the character 
of its commanding officer to a greater or less degree. 

5. The community. A part of the environment 
that cannot be ignored in its morale-making effect 
is the civil community in which the detachment is 
located. And nothing has been made clearer, in our 
short experience at war, than that communities have 
much to learn in the exercise of this function. An 
undue indifference on the one side to the welfare 
and entertainment of the men, and an undue and 
fussy hero-worship on the other, highly embarrass- 
ing to commanding officers, are extremes between 
which the steering is not easy. 



146 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

The young women of a community are perhaps 
chiefly responsible for the quality of the self-esteem 
of enlisted men. It is a fair, and not unanswerable 
question for each community whether on the whole 
it is aiding soldierly sobriety of self-judgment, or 
encouraging the recruit to collect too much in ad- 
vance upon his undoubted future heroism. The re- 
cruit has not ceased to be human because he has be- 
come a soldier. 

6. Elimination of friction. Having mentioned, so 
far, morale-forming agencies which have their effect 
without any direct official effort, I come to a point 
at which deliberate effort can well be directed. 
Morale is a plant that will grow — to a certain extent 
— by itself, if hindrances are removed. A little psy- 
chological discernment used in discovering points of 
friction, ignorance, misunderstanding, or avoidable 
discomfort in the order of living, will do much to 
remove unnecessary barriers to the growth of fight- 
ing spirit. For there are queer paradoxes in human 
nature, which allow those who have given all with- 
out reserve to balk inwardly at trifles, such as food 
slightly below camp standard, when they regard 
those minor troubles as unnecessary. 

Perhaps there is here a general principle of train- 
ing, namely, No hardship for hardship's sake. Mor- 
ale, which includes a good-will to endure whatever 
the undertaking calls for, cannot be made without 
hardship; but for training purposes a line should 
be drawn at the point where the difficulty in question 



MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 147 

ceases to be a genuine preparation, and becomes a 
mere stunt. Thus, for example, night guard duty 
is a normal part of training. This may involve, 
later on, standing in ice-water during winter nights ; 
and that is one of the things men will do without a 
murmur when it is necessary. But it is also one 
of the things which nobody is better fitted for by 
practising it ; and to require it as a part of training 
would be an excess of zeal. 

The elimination of friction does not mean molly- 
coddling the army nor softening the work of train- 
ing: it means the recognition of waste motion, the 
removal of useless puzzles, and the diminution of 
hardship which is without disciplinary value. 

7. Appeal to feeling and imagination. When we 
reach the positive factors of morale-building, i. e., 
those in which a direct effort may be employed, we 
have to tread with some care. It is easy for a posi- 
tive effort to defeat its own purpose, particularly 
if it is labeled or recognized as an effort to improve 
morale. There is always something dismal and 
pathetic, whether in college athletics or elsewhere, 
in an effort to arouse a spirit which the very effort 
declares to be lacking.* 

But it is possible at times to appeal directly to 

*So, for example, the important work of introducing amuse- 
ments of various sorts into camp life, if it gives the impression 
of sugar-coating a pill rather than of meeting a definite demand, 
will have a reaction not wholly expected. Camps cannot have too 
much good entertainment in the right place; but the sense that 
"we" are being good to "you" must be kept out of it. The best 
entertainments are those in which the men themselves take part; 
and the best of all is camp music. 



148 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

the feeling of soldiers in training ; and it goes with- 
out saying that the fundamental feelings involved in 
war-making of which we spoke at the outset,* 
must be enlisted if the morale is to be more 
than a Platonic affair. These feelings, however, 
can hardly live without the aid of imagination. An 
historic opportunity is something that the physical 
eye wholly fails to perceive ; and in a sense, this war, 
whose origins are so remote from us, and whose op- 
erations are so immense, has to be fought on the 
strength of imagination. 

Feeling and imagination are communicated most 
directly by contagion from those who have it; and 
this is true not only of the fundamental feelings in 
the soldier's purpose, but also of those powerful 
auxiliary feelings, his pride as a soldier and his 
pride in his unit. 

In the early days of the war, when Great Britain 
was faced with the problem of making an immense 
and rapid increase in its army, it might have done 
so by creating many new regiments out of the new 
material. Instead, it was decided as far as possible 
to increase the number of battalions in each regi- 
ment, in order that the recruits should have about 
them not alone the traditions of old organizations, 
but the expectant and requiring spirit of men con- 
cerned to maintain their historic standards. 

A remark may not be out of order on the unwis- 
dom of dealing too harshly with the vanity and 

♦Chapter III. 



MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 149 

swagger of young soldiers who are on the way to a 
more decent pride. There are diseases in all child- 
hoods. The soldier has his own dramatic types, 
chesty, * ' Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the 
pard," wanting you to feel in him the old military 
dog. It is true, the mild-eyed diffident chap may beat 
him out as a soldier. But on the whole, bravura is 
the mere excrescence of a valuable quality, and the 
least wise thing an officer can do is to humiliate the 
man who is in the first stages of soldierly self -con- 
sciousness. 

The soldier's pride is involved in the distinction 
that has been persistently drawn between the 
drafted man and the volunteer. Nobody should be 
permitted to make this contrast unrebuked : it is the 
whole meaning of the general draft that the dis- 
tinction shall be obliterated. All drafted men are 
volunteers, but the volunteering has been done en 
bloc by their representatives in Congress. The 
nation has volunteered: the draft is a method for 
organizing the nation at war. 

The problem of morale, in its practical form, is 
very largely that of getting rid of the half -morale 
that is engendered by the situation of necessary 
service created by the draft method. The difficulty 
is the difficulty of all law as it descends upon free- 
men, " leaving them as free as before" — yet not 
quite feeling so free. It is necessary to insert a 
sense of freedom underneath the load of necessity; 
this may be done by flooding the man's own motive 



150 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

power until he, too, wants the war and the draft; 
but it can never be done while the fact of the draft 
seems to him even slightly a derogation from hi9 
personal dignity. 

8. The strengthening of belief. With all that can 
be done to support and inspire the soldier's feelings, 
the one durable factor of morale that is open to di- 
rect control is the man's thought; and the constant 
insistence of our argument has been that it is 
through his thought and belief that his serious feel- 
ings are most honorably as well as most effectively 
approached. 

Beneath the superficial soldier, sensitive about 
his small discomforts, and ready to be amused, there 
is a thoughtful soldier who, perhaps, seldom comes 
to expression, but who nevertheless is thinking his 
long thoughts in his quiet moments, by himself or 
in company with his bunky. To a large degree, men 
take their ideas and beliefs on trust, from the crowd, 
through the gate of emotion. And the soldier is not 
less amenable to these influences than other men. 
But on the other hand, to no one is the individual 
issue so poignant as to the soldier, and his private 
concern must nourish his private thought. The 
time comes when he must realize that it is his career 
that is going into the hopper, his life, possibly the 
welfare of his family. Social persuasions will not 
help him then, — nothing but his own convictions. 

Morale is at bottom a state of will or purpose: 
and the first factor in any mature human purpose 



MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 151 

is knowledge, i. e., knowledge of the thing to be 
gained by the purpose, — the good to be reached or 
the evil to be averted, or both. Hence, in any de- 
velopment of military morale the supreme worth of 
the aims of the war must be made the object of par- 
ticular care.* 

Certain elements of morale, the more personal ele- 
ments relating to the soldier's outlook on religion 
and moral principle in general, must come from out- 
side the army. It is not the business of the army 
to take the place of priest, parent, or schoolmaster. 
If an officer has anything paternal in his tempera- 
ment — and fortunately most officers have — he will 
find many an unofficial occasion for acting in all 
these capacities toward individual men. Non-coms, 
especially top sergeants, who have the advantage of 
mingling much with the members of the company, 
have many an opportunity for a friendly word ; but 
if the captain is of the right sort, he can without loss 
of military dignity bring much of the quality of the 
family into his entire command; the French are 

*It is better to take this motive for granted than to tamper with 
it and belabor it ineffectively, argumentatively, or oratorically. 
The inspiring speech always has its function; but for the longer 
thoughts of the soldier in training, nothing but sober truth in tho 
form of information and reflection will give him the grist he needs. 
Nothing could be more powerful as a morale-making agency than the 
action of a nation which should, as it were, lay its cards on the 
table before its soldiers in training, and say, "These are the data 
upon which our decision is based; this is the history of the case; 
these are the principles involved. Judge for yourself." I dare say 
it is unprecedented in the history of warfare that the United States 
in the summer of 1918 inaugurated just this undertaking in a 
large number of its training detachments. 



102 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

especially gifted in this way. But these are matters 
of personality; and it relieves the army for single- 
minded attention to its proper work to have outside 
agencies in co-operation with it, — provided these 
agencies do not become too numerous and distract- 
ing. The church in some form, preferably in its 
own representatives than in its numerous offshoots, 
should be always accessible. For in the long run a 
man must fight on the strength of his religion; his 
beliefs about things above the human level permeate 
all those human and social beliefs which directly 
concern the war. 

Belief in the validity of the cause, belief in the 
method of procedure — i. e., that war is called for, 
belief in the possibility (not the ease) of success, 
belief in the army and its management. These are 
the chief building-stones for lasting morale, — and 
whatever the army can do to strengthen these be- 
liefs, by direct instruction or otherwise, will add to 
its resources throughout the war. 

In addition to these, each soldier needs a phil- 
osophy of life which enables him to adjust himself 
to the minor and major troubles of his situation and 
work. These for the most part, he must work out 
for himself in the school of experience : but he may 
be aided by whatever of light his personal advisers, 
religious and other, may give him. And there is 
also a good chance that the psychologist may be of 
use to him, especially in dealing with the problem of 
fear. 



CHAPTER XIV 

FEAB AND ITS CONTROL 

Courage is the traditional kernel of morale and the 
characteristic quality of the soldier. I doubt, how- 
ever, whether it is a distinct and separate quality. 
Given discipline, experience, good condition, pug- 
nacity, and faith, you will not find courage lacking 
in any body of men. It is hardly distinct from 
morale in general. The same influences that under- 
mine morale will also undermine courage; namely, 
indifference, discouragement, and fear. But cour- 
age is generally considered as the especial element 
of character which overcomes fear. And as fear is 
universal, we shall give some attention to its nature, 
and to the ways of meeting it. 

Many men suffer, during their training days, from 
a fear of fear. They hope they will not funk when 
the time comes; but they are not inwardly sure of 
it. The fact is, no one knows in advance how he is 
going to behave in an emergency. But one thing 
can be said with entire confidence — and this should 
be of some service to those who fancy that their 
being afraid will mark them out from their com- 
rades — everybody fears. 

This is the unanimous testimony of men who have 
seen enough of war to judge competently, and to 

153 



154 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

speak with candor. But the biological nature of 
fear would lead to the same conclusion. 

For while there are many things which ordinarily 
arouse fear, they all have this in common: they are 
or represent conditions for which man has no organs 
of instinctive adaptation. Being held under water, 
or over deep spaces of empty air, causes instinctive 
shrinking to the creature who has neither gills nor 
wings. Fire, loud noises (suggesting changes too 
rapid for our powers of adjustment), and for a time, 
darkness and solitude, indicate in the same way a 
world unfit for our native powers. 

Fear, in short, may be described as the natural 
reaction to a radically unfit environment ; and there 
is no better composite example of such an environ- 
ment than the field of battle. There are innate nerv- 
ous connections which tend to operate spontane- 
ously, without consulting will and reason, to 
diminish the steadiness of muscular control, obscure 
the vision, alter the breathing, and dry the throat. 
fThey can be brought under control, but as in most 
other matters, after having been experienced, and 
by the aid of experience, — not before. 

In fact, it is rather what a man thinks than what 
he physically experiences in battle that arouses fear : 
man's imagination has always been, since the days 
of taboo-magic, spooks, and witchcraft, his chief 
source of apprehension and dread. All animals have 
life-preservative reactions; but probably it is only 
man that fears death, for it is only man that knows — 



FEAB AND ITS CONTROL 155 

or thinks he knows — enough about death to feel in 
it the terror of the unfathomed and unknown. 

It is within the truth to say that man is naturally 
the most fear-ful of animals,* partly on account of 
this reflectiveness and forethought, partly because 
he is more sensitive to pain, and largely because of 
his purely aesthetic regard for his own body. In 
the instinctive shrinking from the impact of bullet 
or shell-fragment it is less the pain or the finish that 
one dreads than the idea of mutilation, of the ruth- 
less mixing and tearing of fine-wrought tissues, and 
of perpetual bondage to the consciousness of a 
broken frame. There is withal a disinterested 
hatred of the shame and waste of it — the miserable 
destruction of this fair and serviceable machine, the 
body. None of these elements of human fear would 
trouble the brute. 

Fear is, therefore, no discredit to a man: on the 
contrary it would be rather less than human to be 
undisturbed at the beginning of one's experience 
under fire. 

But the beginning of the control of fear comes 
from the same human faculty of self -consciousness ; 
namely, from understanding the psychological 
nature of fear, and its normal function in the organ- 
ism. For fear, as a sign that instinctive processes 
of concealment or flight have been aroused, is a 
normal reaction to an abnormal situation. It is a 

"Du Picq says that "of all animals man is the most cowardly." 
The idea is right, but the expression is misleading, for reasons 
given below. 



156 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

state of transition from a lower to a higher level of 
activity, having in common with anger the secretion 
of adrenalin which throws the balance of circula- 
tion from the viscera to the large body muscles, in- 
creases the quantity of sugar in the blood — the most 
available of organic fuels, and raises the threshold 
of fatigue, preparing the body for the long and 
heavy exertion of flight or fight, as the case may be. 
In a small way, any one who has gone through the 
experience of embarrassment in speaking before an 
audience can recognize this function. Spealdng is a 
matter of vigorous organic activity; and what we 
call embarrassment indicates the transition — per- 
haps from the comparative inaction and irrespon- 
sibility of sitting, one among many, on a platform, 
to the state of effort in which alone you must ''hold" 
your audience. As your moment approaches you 
may find your heart chugging uneasily, your breath 
impeded, and your mouth dry : and you may say to 
yourself, "I am embarrassed; this is wholly unrea- 
sonable," a bit of introspection which — if it goes 
no farther — only adds to your confusion. But if 
your reflection goes a stage farther, and you realize 
that your body is making dumb efforts to prepare 
for a new level of action, your self -consciousness 
may become a help : by rousing yourself to a position 
of alertness and taking a few deep breaths of your 
own accord, you can give nature a lift, and make 
the transition less abrupt. The same is true to some 
extent of more serious types of fear : one who real- 



FEAE AND ITS CONTROL 157 

izes what nature is trying to do for him in its rather 
bedevilled attempts to supply him with unwonted 
active-capacity can to a certain extent look on and 
guide the process. 

For there is no doubt that a fearsome body can 
co-exist with a thoroughly cool and determined head. 
The old story of General Turenne will bear repeat- 
ing. Finding himself on one occasion unable to sup- 
press his shaking, he addressed his body thus: 
1 'Tremble, body: you would tremble still more if 
you knew into what I am going to take you." 
The same observant detachment of mind from body, 
— just short of the more effective freedom of con- 
trol — is seen in a tale of our own late unpleasantness 
in which a subordinate officer ventured to remark to 
his colonel, ' ' Colonel, you seem frightened, ' ' and re- 
ceived the retort, "So I am: and if you were half 
as frightened as I am, you would be several miles 
from this spot."* 

It is well to know, also, that fear is a matter of 
degree and is highly variable, sometimes unaccount- 
ably so. Fatigue, drowsiness, darkness, and sur- 
prise, all increase liability to fear. Nearly every 

*I imagine that this same sense of detachment and semi-externa! 
control of his body is what suggested the idea of being an "actor" 
to the British officer who wrote these words in a letter: 

"An officer out here has to be very brave or a very good actor, — 
I think 90 per cent are actors. A bad actor is sent home, and a good 
one is either polished off or earns the reputation of being a 'fearless 
leader.' I think it is an insult to call a man 'fearless': I would 
rather be called 'brainless.' . . . However there are times when 
one can't help feeling that the acting can't go on forever, and I 
am much more frightened of losing my head than I am of losing 
my life. Discipline must be the strongest force in the world." 



158 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

man is subject to transitory conditions of "nerves" 
in which he will behave as under normal circum- 
stances he would not. The man who when played 
out will jump at a snap of the finger may go over 
the top without a tremor when he is fresh.* It is 
estimated that the general average accuracy of fire 
in an engagement is l/50th of the normal accuracy. 
General de Negrier has said that five out of a hun- 
dred keep cool enough to fire as they would on the 
range : but it must be said that ninety out of a hun- 
dred are cool enough to fire in the general direction 
of the enemy. f And there are few unable to use 
the bayonet when they have reached that point. 

Because of this variability, no one should be 
counted cowardly on the strength of his behavior 
in any particular case. It seems to me, indeed, very 
uncertain whether the noun "coward" has any valid 
application. There are certainly cowardly actions, 
but I doubt whether there are any cowards. Fear 
does not mean cowardice, for every normal human 
being fears ; and every normal human being can con- 
trol his fear, given sufficient experience, sufficient 
opportunity to reckon with himself, and withal suf- 
ficient interest in what he is doing 

The courage required in the present war is of a 

*The behavior of Napoleon's right wing in the battle of Wagram 
shows this variability. 

fin this respect, as in others, the American Marines at Chateau 
Thierry achieved distinction. A participant writing of their rifle 
fire says: "That men should fire deliberately use their sights, and 
adjust their range was beyond their experience. It must have had 
a telling effect on the morale of the Boche." 



FEAK AND ITS CONTROL 159 

more deliberate sort than that of previous wars, 
less supported by dash and the admiring eyes of 
comrades. "Trench courage,' ' as LeBon says, "is 
unaccompanied by fame : it consists almost entirely 
in keeping cool and in giving brain and will free 
play." The picture of courage is for the most part 
simply the picture of steadiness, the mental poise 
which comes from learning what can and what can- 
not be done in given situations, of ceasing to try to 
calculate what is incalculable, or to dodge the dan- 
ger that is past ; and from reducing as much as pos- 
sible to the level of habit. 

Much depends on this matter of habit; for no mind 
can keep its balance unless there is a goodly propor- 
tion of what it can count on in the midst of what is 
new and unanticipated from moment to moment. 
The whole business of training, so far as it bears 
on fear, consists in increasing the proportion of the 
known to the unknown in every situation of combat. 
Beside this, men in the trenches become keen ob- 
servers of the habits of the enemy, know his mess 
hours, his methods of shelling, and his hours for 
strafing different spots : in all this our boys are much 
aided by the methodical disposition of Fritzy, or 
were so aided in earlier days. During my visit to 
the front, I heard that the Germans had begun to 
learn that their regularity was to our advantage, 
and had begun methodically to vary their methods. 
At the best the amount of uncertainty and shifting 
in warfare is greatly in excess of the amount of 



160 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

possible habit; the mind has to live much in what 
may be called the secondary habits — the habits of 
making changes and adjustments of given kinds, 
as from firing line to billets, from holding to attack, 
from extreme idleness to extreme action. Almost 
we might say, warfare of to-day requires the habit 
of passing from extreme to extreme. But in any 
case, a basis of habit is created, and with it the pos- 
sibility of mentally classing the dangers, taking their 
measure, and so reducing the scope of fear. 

"Familiarity with the same dangers eventually 
leaves the human animal unmoved. One's nerves no 
longer quiver; the conscious and constant effort to 
keep control over one's self is successful in the end. 
Therein lies the secret of all military courage. Men 
are not born brave; they become brave. The in- 
stinct to be conquered is more or less resistant, that 
is all. 

"Moreover, one must live on the field of battle, 
just as elsewhere: it is necessary to become accus- 
tomed to this new existence no matter how perilous 
or harsh it may be. And what renders it difficult, 
more intolerable, is fear, the fear that throttles and 
paralyzes. It has to be conquered, and finally one 
does conquer it."* 

Instinctively, in this way, the mind builds up its 
own first line of defense against panic. But beside 
this, there are various ways of dealing with the un- 
welcome emotion as it begins to make itself felt, 
such as every man learns for himself. It may not 
be out of place to suggest certain of the more natu- 
ral ways in which an antidote to fear can be found. 

•Paul Lintier in "My 75." 



FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 161 

THE CONTROL OF FEAR 

Fear seldom outlasts the first plunge into combat ; 
it has its chance to grow during the tense time of 
waiting for the moment of attack. Action is the 
sufficient antidote for fear in most cases; but for 
the moments in which there is still a chance to direct 
one's thoughts, the following natural aids to con- 
trol may be mentioned: 

1. Turning the mind deliberately to some- 
thing in the region of habit, — i. e., to something in 
which your control is certain and easy. The self- 
suggestion of mastery of the situation flows outward 
from any such center. A triviality of routine is 
evidently better for this purpose than a thought- 
demanding enterprise. Hence the instinctive resort 
to cigarette or pipe; the mechanical review of the 
equipment, etc. 

2. Turning the mind to the troubles of the other 
man. Fear is an attack of acute self -consciousness, 
and is accordingly incompatible with self-forgetful- 
ness. Here the habit of unselfishness is a great 
stand-by. It is a general psychological law that self- 
ishness predisposes to fear; and we may add that 
all forms of sensuality predispose to selfishness. 

3. Turning the mind to what you are going to do 
to the enemy, rather than to what he is going to do 
to you. The most complete antidote for fear is pug- 
nacity. Nature has made the organic base of the 
two emotions the same: both fighting and running 



162 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

away require large stocks of available energy for 
intense and prolonged exertion. In the animal 
world, the question whether to fight or run is some- 
times a close one; and there is an obvious advan- 
tage in having the two instinctive mechanisms 
mounted, so to speak, on the same groundwork. A 
recollection of the sources of indignation that are 
most vital to the individual soldier may make just 
the difference between an inward-turned and an 
outward-turned set of mind, and between hesitation 
and resolve. General Grant, in the well-known pas- 
sage of his Memoirs, tells how he was afraid of the 
enemy until it occurred to him that the enemy was 
just as much afraid of him. 

4. Recollection of first principles. The relative 
importance of things is distorted by fear, as by other 
emotions: the possibilities of the present crisis in 
bringing pain or disfigurement or death loom bigger 
than the things one is fighting for — which have a 
way of retreating into the shadow. This is the time 
for the philosophy of a man's quieter hours ; a time 
for recalling that self of reference we were speak- 
ing of, and the symbols of the drill-ground with all 
that has been put into them of meaning. Plato's 
definition of courage has not lost its point : he said 
that courage was a holding to one's knowledge of 
what is better and what is worse, — i. e., when cir- 
cumstances favor forgetting. Sentiment distin- 
guishes itself from belief in the moment of trial; 
and the mind of the man that is furnished with the 



FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 163 

belief in the proportions of thirds set forth in these 
quiet words of Captain Norman Leslie of the Irish 
Rifle Brigade will hold its level: 

"Try not to worry too much about the war," he 
wrote in a letter shortly before his death in action. 
"Units and individuals cannot count. Remember 
we are writing a new page of history. Future gen- 
erations cannot be allowed to read of the decline of 
the British Empire, and attribute it to us. We live 
our little lives and die. To some are given chances 
of proving themselves men, and to others no chance 
comes." 

What is it to "prove one's self a man"? I think 
it means, to prove one's power to see the greatness 
of the great purposes of history, as only a man can 
see them; and to count oneself ennobled by giving 
himself to them. 

Fear is, of course, a sign of incomplete dedica- 
tion. It is due to the lingering physical hope still 
to save something of what in principle one has given 
away. Of the "Spirit of the French Troops" 
Lieut. Col. Paul Azan says, "The certainty of being 
hit one day or another is in the mind of each; far 
from quenching enthusiasm this stimulates it." 
This spirit is surely the desideratum, whether or not 
it is within reach of the average human frame: to 
have made up one's mind to the final sacrifice, and 
then to fill what time one has with the maximum of 
effect. 



164 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

SUGGESTIONS FOB OFFICERS ON THE CONTROL OF FEAR IN 
THEIR MEN 

1. While it is for the soldier to lean against his 
own self-concern, it is for the officer to take the 
other direction, and meet more than half way the 
natural element of self-interest that is in all fear. 
Every man has a reasonable interest in not being 
forgotten, or being simply a bit of waste in the 
great scrap heap of war:* anything that reminds 
him that he counts, and will not be lost sight of, will 
reach the right spot. A sign of personal interest 
will mean much; such a formality as calling the 
roll will likewise mean much in another way, for it is 
a sign of the presence there of the State itself, tak- 
ing strict account of its individual members. 

A French officer writes as follows of the morning 
of the great and costly offensive of April 16, 1917 : 

' ' I remember when my battalion was preparing to 
jump over the parapet. I went through the trenches 
to see if everybody was ready. I shook hands with 
many of the soldiers; their officers were among 
them. I felt everywhere a wave of brotherhood, a 
feeling of duty, of grim determination. . Part of 
the officers were killed during the battle. One of 
them was a young priest, a company commander 
named Marck. When we were relieved on April 
20, those men went across to his grave. Nobody 
could stop them. They disinterred the corpse and 

*These words of a wounded British soldier at Southampton show 
the persistent feeling that waste is the only intolerable thing: 

"It's well thought out, and I think you'll find that all our casual- 
ties whatever they may be will be well paid for, — nothing wasted 
or chucked away. . . . Myself? — You can't make such big omelettes 
as this without cracking a good many eggs, you know!" 



FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 165 

carried it with them wrapped in canvas, though we 
had a very hard march of ten miles in the mud dur- 
ing the night, pitch dark, and under continual bom- 
bardment. Those men wanted to give to the chief 
they loved a solemn funeral." Thus the individual 
quality asserts itself and seeks its rights in the midst 
of the vast impersonality of war. 

2. Aid the outward-turning of their minds, by 
giving them something to do while waiting. Call 
their attention to the small concrete duties that have 
become semi-automatic, the order of their equip- 
ment, etc., thus reminding them of their "self of 
reference." If circumstances permit their being 
allowed to fire, whether or not the firing will do much 
good, so much the better: whatever suggests doing 
things to the enemy will aid the turning of bodily 
preparations down the pugnacity-channel rather 
than the fear-channel. Fear can better be met by 
substitution of alternative interests than by di- 
rectly rebuking it and so recognizing and consoli- 
dating it, producing a division within the mind. 
It is here that "suggestion" has its place: ideas of 
action and of success can be suggested, ideas of the 
game side of the operation, rivalry with other units, 
etc. 

3. But fear will never be met by minimizing the 
occasion : this only drives it to deeper, more private 
and dangerous recesses. What men have the great- 
est right to, under the circumstances of battle, is 
the fullest knowledge of their general situation that 
can be given them. Their objectives they already 



166 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

know, probably in minute detail, together with the 
exact routes of reaching them. But they also are 
concerned to have full knowledge of what is against 
them, of what suport and reserve is behind them, 
— and if possible of the strength and disposition of 
the artillery. 

It is not incompatible with the suggestion of suc- 
cess to prepare the men with the greatest candor for 
all contingencies, forestalling in this way the pos- 
sibility of surprise, the greatest breeder of panic. 
An officer who has once concealed the worst facts 
of the situation from his command, can hardly hope 
for their full confidence, — an indispensable element 
in any power he may have over their fears. 

4. Be alert for the beginnings of agitation, hurry 
or confusion; slow the men down, suspend firing, 
or otherwise give them a chance to recover control. 
If you have to deal with an infectious bit of fear, 
avoid violent methods except as a last resort. Do 
not, however, use threat or bluster as a substitute 
for action ; mean everything you say. Only remem- 
ber that extremes, before extremes are necessary, 
are a confession of your own alarm, and make the 
case worse. Caesar's way of rallying a broken col- 
umn may still have an application. Finding the 
standard bearer, he said, "Friend, you are mis- 
taken : it is in this direction you mean to run. ' ' 

5. Many men fear through a false conception of 
the nature of heroism. They are likely to think that 
it consists in an imprudent and irregular ' ' contempt 



FEAB AND ITS CONTROL 167 

of danger"; and this feeling is enhanced by the gen- 
eral approval of occasional brilliant and foolhardy 
escapades. There is a real dilemma here for the 
officer; and I see no complete solution of it, — for 
what the dare-devils do is often immensely worth 
doing. But the men must learn that steady team- 
work and strict adherence to orders are the basis of 
the courage that counts ; and that a dead soldier is 
seldom of further use to the present emergency. 

The same applies, of course, to the officer's own 
action. The most powerful means, to-day as always, 
of steadying a wavering line at a critical moment 
is the instant readiness of officers to act in "con- 
tempt of danger"; but the example of self -exposure 
will be powerful just in proportion as it has been 
kept in reserve, and so bears the meaning of a 
deliberate rather than an impulsive or flurried act. 
Even in the heat of battle, that command of the 
head which can instantly bend every means accu- 
rately to the end, and in the most lavish spending 
still conserve, — that presence of the mind, is the one 
supreme source of stability and control, 



CHAPTER XV 

WAR AND WOMEN 

The seasoned soldier is apt to regard with some im- 
patience the various signs of public concern about 
the morals of men in service. The main reason for 
this impatience we can readily understand. It is 
not a simple case of the annoyance which any ex- 
ternal solicitude for the personal consciences of 
mature men is bound to excite. It is a feeling that 
such solicitude at such a moment is out of order and 
out of perspective. When everything depends upon 
speed, concentration, and the good-will on all hands 
to suppress distracting side-issues, the questionings 
of the personal moralist might well seem strangely 
ill-timed. 

There are other reasons less elementary and less 
general. There are many who feel that in war all 
values are somewhat altered ; that the moral balance 
of the men is bound to undergo a temporary change 
for the work in hand; that we must be prepared to 
accept a certain amount of crudity and error as a 
part of the cost of war in exactly the same spirit as 
that in which Lincoln accepted the rampant profit- 
eering of his day as a part of the cost of the Civil 
War. And there are some who believe that our 
nominal standards of social conduct are over-refined 

168 



WAB AND WOMEN 169 

if not actually dishonest; that soldiering promises 
to bring a franker and freer and sounder temper 
into our bourgeois existence; that the burden of 
proof, at any rate, rests rather upon the civilian 
than upon the military ideal, wherever they prove 
to differ. 

But among the many things which make this war 
unusual, one of the most conspicious is the fact that, 
while men have never been put to such intense and 
long-continued strain, there has never been such 
organized and minute study of the soldier's needs. 
It is a part of the great and critical game of 
efficiency that every leak should be examined and 
understood. There is no disposition to accept as a 
necessary evil anything that has a bearing on the 
health or morale of the men. And while morality, 
in the narrower sense, is far from identical with 
morale, it distinctly bears on it — as, for example, 
in the connection between sensuality and fear of 
which we were speaking. The old-fashioned army 
officer who played the double role of regarding the 
morals of his men as their own private affair, and 
at the same time of seeing to it that in view of 
human nature a degree of opportunity for self- 
indulgence was not lacking, has all but disappeared. 
Our army commands are becoming studiously pater- 
nal in order that no element of success shall be 
overlooked. 

To my mind there is no need for the services 
either of the censor or of the professional white- 



170 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

washer in this matter of the soldier's morality. In 
this day of general willingness to face facts, and 
ability to judge them sanely, these services are more 
likely to do harm than good. The cure for the critic 
is not suppression; and the cure for any incidental 
evil of army life is not criticism. In each case the 
need is for accurate knowledge and a wider psy- 
chological understanding. 

Two facts inseparable from war tend to make the 
soldier in general and the woman in general un- 
usually interesting to each other. One is that the 
soldier regards himself, and is regarded, as engaged 
in protecting women and what women stand for. 
Women become the symbols for the whole of that 
amenity of life built up and cherished by the finer 
sensitivities of the race; the soldier becomes the 
symbol of its defense. The other is that in the 
actual business of war men are segregated and 
women are segregated. The communities at the 
front, and to a lesser degree the communities at 
home, are communities of one sex. If it were only 
a matter of the habitual balance of mental existence, 
this fact might be expected to develop in each sex a 
heightened wish for the companionship of the other. 

Further, the innumerable subtle filaments that in 
ordinary conditions carry away the direct conscious- 
ness of manhood and womanhood are swept away. 
In the daily routine of peace, men and women 
acquire the habit of forgetting that they are men 



WAR AND WOMEN 171 

and women. They are able to deal with one another, 
not quite impersonally, but unsexually — as buyers 
and sellers, as employers and employed, as providers 
of services, as thinkers, choosers, connoisseurs, hu- 
man beings. Or rather, they are able to keep the 
continuous current of sex-interest in the position 
of an inactive spectator, making its own remarks, 
stimulating or retarding the flow of intercourse, but 
wholly out of circuit for the main business in hand. 
This is a late and difficult achievement of civiliza- 
tion, an achievement in equilibrium, a bit of ground 
won from a masterful instinctive prepossession, 
won precariously and unequally by different races 
and members of races, but an achievement upon 
which obviously the freedom and scope of civilized 
life directly depend. Hard work, the pursuit of 
science, concern for justice, and in fact for every 
end we call "objective," naturally inhibit the sexual 
motive, and can thrive only as it is inhibited or 
sublimated. This equilibrium war everywhere de- 
stroys. 

Turn from general forces to the individual human 
being caught in the flood of war. Accustomed to 
live in the future, sometimes far in the future, the 
plan-making animal finds his plans cut across by 
war as peremptorily as by death ; no longer master 
of to-morrow, the spirit of chance and adventure 
enters as foresight disappears. But the adventure 
in any case is great and radical; in place of those 
small groups of specialized men with whom one car- 



172 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

ried on one's thoughtful dealings, one is now sensi- 
bly taking part in something vast, something total. 
One may hate war without limit ; in every man there 
is still a love of the sweeping catastrophic event just 
because it is immense — as one may gaze at a great 
fire, not without horror and yet not without de- 
lighted wonder. In this new and great world old 
habits fail to fit; at the roots of the tree of char- 
acter there works, in spite of all, an unsettling 
spirit. 

The intoxication of war might well be held in 
check by the tragic meaning of the event if men 
went to war singly. But the strange comradeship 
of camp and barracks fans the common and simpler 
elements of excitement, and sends into swift retire- 
ment the sober and reflective self of civil life. Where 
so many habits must be broken, it is small wonder if 
the feeling prevails that all rules are off — all the 
old rules. The life of the soldier has its own rules 
and ideals; but the tamer virtues stand in a paler 
light : they are not means to the great ends of war. 
They lose in the perspective of psychological impor- 
tance. 

If in such radical readjustment the ties of conven- 
tion are loosened, this is not an unmixed calamity. 
Unless we are prepared to say that our conventions 
are all good, such a liquidation of mental fixities 
should bring with it many salutary liberations. 
Whatever makes the world consciously kin, breaks 
down reserve, caste, and crust, and favors the direct 



WAR AND WOMEN 173 

approach and prompt response of one mind to an- 
other, leaves humanity its debtor. The spirit of 
war is experimental, pragmatic, accustomed to large 
changes, discounting all ordinary impossibilities. 
The tether of imagination is loosened; and men be- 
come fearless — irreverent perhaps, but at least 
fearless — in dealing with the issues of life and 
death, and hence with all minor issues. If anything 
in the world is merely conventional it will fare badly 
before this temper; and all conventions, however 
well-founded, may expect a challenge. What of the 
conventions that surround the family; will they be 
held immune? 

Though I put the question as one of the psychol- 
ogy of the soldier, it becomes part of his problem 
that women are not unaffected by the same unrest. 
If the men are more released and venturesome, the 
women are more at a loss without their usual 
helpers. Their fireside is no longer the place of 
safety and reassurance. In the small towns of 
Europe one sees the simple expression of this 
change. Moved by a mixture of enthusiasm, grati- 
tude, bewilderment, and fear, the women are drawn 
out into the companionship of the market and the 
street, where the news, the passing excitements, the 
spirit of the tribe, the physical presence of the 
bearers of power, provide the needed mental sus- 
tainment. It is as if in times of war the god of com- 
mon life had withdrawn from the family hearth and 
had taken up his residence in the places of public 



174 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

concourse. The general interest grows at the ex- 
pense of the particular; and as in ancient days, a 
certain promiscuity of feeling, a community of 
goods and destinies, breaks down ordinary barriers. 
Some of the same psychological forces that make 
patriotism and religion prominent, and result in the 
merging of interests and services in the tide of com- 
mon devotion, threaten for the moment the finer 
sense of propriety and distinction in the minds of 
the keepers of distinction, the women. 

One who cannot understand and sympathize with 
these general tendencies is so far untouched by the 
psychological mood of war. And given these tend- 
encies, we have to expect as a matter of statistics 
that there will be laxity in relations of sex. When 
the stream rises, it picks up at first the floatable and 
unanchored objects along its banks ; and we get an 
impression of disorder and dissolution. Rumor 
seizes on local troubles and paints them as universal. 
What we need is some way of gauging the meaning 
and extent of the situation ; we need a judgment of 
proportion. 

It is well to remember that no " general tendency" 
has all its own way with men. One of the most 
extraordinary qualities of human nature is its 
power to recognize when it is being affected by a 
general tendency, and to institute counteractive 
measures. At the theater one perceives the on- 
coming of the emotional onslaught and fortifies 



WAR AND WOMEN 175 

himself; so with the excitement at a great game, or 
with the beginnings of fear in an emergency. In 
the same way, every soldier knows more or less 
clearly that he is subject to the illusions of the un- 
usual, and is to this extent on his guard. Despite 
all superficial disturbances, a man's conscience is 
the most persistent and unyielding of his mental 
ingredients; and every man remains the keeper of 
his own conscience. When the first chaotic period 
of readjustment has ended in the making of new 
habits and a recovery of some mental steadiness, 
he finds that what he has cared for continues to 
exist, even if his direct active connection with it is 
broken. Its laws, so far as they are valid, still bind 
him, and perhaps the more firmly because what he 
has cared for is out of his present reach. The sol- 
dier who can keep alive his communication with his 
own family has a powerful stabilizer in the unsettle- 
ments of war. 

What we should naturally expect, even if nothing 
were done about it, would be first of all a segrega- 
tion of the lightly anchored from the firmly anchored 
members of society; and then a steady clearing of 
the stream, as both the individual soldier and the 
army as a whole begin to get their bearings and to 
learn from experience. Errors at first are not to be 
taken as a measure of what is to follow. Self- 
respect is too vital an asset whether in war or in 
peace not to become in time, and by its own obvious 
worth, the rule of the great majority. 



176 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

Naturally, the boys who are over-seas are more 
likely to feel themselves in a world apart, where 
moral causality seems to pursue them less relent- 
lessly. In their case, much depends on the tradition 
of their own particular unit. Men have a startling 
tendency to yield their opinions to what they believe 
(whether rightly or not) most of the rest of their 
group are doing. They have an equally prompt and 
surprising tendency to control themselves, even to 
the point of asceticism, if they believe that control 
is the order of the day with their comrades, and 
particularly with their officers. 

There is in London an office where soldiers belong- 
ing to one of the expeditionary forces are required 
to register when they are in the city on leave, and 
where surgeons in charge explain to them and warn 
them against the conditions they will meet in the 
London streets. Between March 1 and July 1, 1917, 
34,374 members of this expeditionary force regis- 
tered here ; and of these a certain number took from 
the office the prophylactic there supplied which 
would measurably guard them against venereal in- 
fection. This number was given to me by the officer 
in charge as 30,000. From the medical point of view 
the work of this office is a great success ; for among 
these men the percentage of infection is only about 
two per cent as compared with over four per cent 
in the British army.* But the officers in charge 

•The rate in the American Expeditionary Force is reported, Au- 
gust, 1918, as less than one per cent. 



WAR AND WOMEN 177 

realized that they had no prophylactic against moral 
infection, if this is the right name for it. The con- 
ditions of the London streets and the tradition of 
the units concerned, they had at the time no way of 
contending against. 

The German army was in pre-war times more suc- 
cessful than either the French army or the British 
army in reducing its percentage of veneral disease 
through scientific prophylaxis. Recruits entering 
the British army during the years 1900-1908 showed 
5 cases of venereal disease per thousand, as against 
7.5 cases per thousand among the German recruits. 
As members of the British army, these same men 
showed 66 cases per thousand, as against 19.4 cases 
per thousand in the German army. It is said that 
since 1914, the British rate has been reduced to 48.3 
per thousand ; the German rate is unknown to me. 

Nothing could show more vividly than these figures 
the contrast between physical and moral prophy- 
laxis. Hygienically successful as the German meth- 
ods of dealing with this problem are, it is a fair ques- 
tion whether there is not a direct causal connection 
between those methods and the coarsening of fiber 
implied in the incomparable animality of the Ger- 
man armies in the field. The systematic official ad- 
ministering of prophylaxis in our navies and armies 
is a necessity. Any such administration acknowl- 
edges to the men the customariness of the breach of 
custom involved; the psychological step from this 
to an appearance of official sanction is a short one. 



178 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

It is safe to assume that we have no desire to move 
in the direction of the German temper in this mat- 
ter, while using or copying German remedies. It is 
a pertinent question, then, whether the act of deal- 
ing in physical immunity does not create an obliga- 
tion to go a step farther in a positive effort to coun- 
teract the impression of sanction. 

We have no right to jump to the conclusion that 
the city of London, or the city of Paris, or any other 
city could control the situation entirely. For the 
above-mentioned officer has found by careful in- 
quiry that of the women involved the number of 
professional prostitutes is smaller than the num- 
ber of " amateurs, ' ' that is to say, of girls who 
accept no money. The control must come through 
such measures as our own army in France has 
already wisely instituted, keeping the boys as far 
as possible out of the large cities until they have 
got their balance ; and so starting their life abroad 
with a tradition of the reverse order; and, further, 
through a careful study of the special needs of the 
soldier on leave. 

The data already mentioned were of men on leave, 
after a time of severe fighting, not of men going to 
the front for the first time. The man who has just 
come from the trenches is in a state of mind which, 
if not precisely abnormal, has problems of its own 
The same inhuman strain, which makes "permis- 
sion" necessarily more frequent in this war than in 



WAR AND WOMEN 179 

preceding wars, makes the release a time of peculiar 
difficulty. As it was put to me by an American boy 
in the Canadian army who was enjoying ten days' 
leave in Paris : ' ' When a man comes out of the 
trenches, he doesn't care what he does — he doesn't 
care." All our civil scruples and weighings and 
haltings look small to him. This is his moment of 
freedom; and perhaps his one chance to take what 
joy there is in existence. He is going back again; 
he has signed away his claim on life. He feels that 
he has acquired special rights — and here are the 
opportunities. And beside this, he has been starv- 
ing, probably not in body, but in spirit ; he has been 
living in barrenness, and he has been starving for 
the tender and kindly side of life. He has a need 
for the society of women. 

It is worse than useless to go at this problem as a 
problem of repression. So long as the soldier is a 
drilling and preparing soldier, repression is in 
place. If he fails to practise restraint, it is chiefly 
his captain or his major or his colonel who is re- 
sponsible. There is no excuse for looseness about 
drill-camps; our experience on the Mexican border 
has opened our eyes on this point. At the great 
camp at Aldershot, I saw a group of men training in 
gymnastics. Their spirit was as amazing as their 
form ; they had a passion for perfection ; ninety out 
of a hundred of them gave voluntary extra hours 
after a heavy day's work. Dissipation to these 
men was an impossibility; and for them the problem 



180 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

did not exist. But the soldier on leave is without 
any such immediate ambition for being in condition ; 
and he has, I repeat, a definite need for the society 
of women. 

But the soldier on leave is not much in a mood for 
the apparatus of introductions and other proprieties 
which hedge our women about. What he wants is 
a freer kind of association, a gayer and readier 
choice, an easier come and go. To put it baldly, to 
meet his needs, women must be accessible and rela- 
tively anonymous, as well as agreeable in the sense 
of meeting his particular fancy and being ready 
for a good time. The soldier on leave would prefer 
not to be burdened with the fact that Miss X is the 
daughter of So-and-so, living in the city of Boston, 
Mass., and related to the B's and C's. He wishes 
to take her as a companion, without other history 
than naturally finds its way into conversation, and 
without future obligations. His mind is fatigued 
with obligations ; his relief consists largely in being 
irresponsible. He is in a frame of mind for what 
Wiliam James has called a moral holiday. We can 
sympathize with him; without any such excuse as 
his, most of us feel the need for an occasional moral 
holiday. 

Such a relationship is neither objectionable nor 
impossible. For example, a British soldier on leave 
in Paris " picked up," as he said to me, a little 
French girl on the Champs Elysees. It was his first 
visit to Paris. She called a taxi, and took him to 



WAR AND WOMEN 181 

various places which she thought a stranger would 
care to see. They had dinner together and went to 
a theater. After it was over she said, "Good night, 
I must go home now, ' ' and left him. I do not know 
how often this particular poise is to be found; but 
I believe it is more frequent than the suspicious 
eye imagines. It has its difficulties ; and is obviously 
beyond the reach of a general policy. But it may 
serve to point the way to what is possible. 

Among the possibilities are the admission of 
qualified women into service at the canteens both 
within and outside the war zone. Thousands of 
English women, — I have heard the number stated at 
30,000, and a number of American women are 
already engaged in this work, which should be ex- 
tended. What is wanted is the woman who has 
unlimited good fellowship together with unlimited 
good sense and poise, a type of woman in which 
America is peculiarly rich, though the official diffi- 
culties of excluding the undesirables, the faddists, 
and the excitables, are very great. The opening of 
cafes and tea-houses in the cities is also of use; 
though it suffers by comparison because of the 
greater formality which our women feel obliged to 
assume in the city. The Red Triangle huts in the 
main centers have a certain number of women 
helpers; but there is for the most part a palpable 
pressure of decorum and caution which discour- 
ages the gayer give-and-take. In Liverpool, and, I 
am told, in Leeds, an experiment is being made 



182 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

which sounds promising. There is a refreshment 
room with a dancing-floor and music; and into this 
place any man in uniform may bring any woman he 
chooses, and the pair may enjoy themselves, at 
small expense, so long as they remain within liberal 
bounds of propriety. There the men meet their 
acquaintances; and there any respectable girl may 
spend a pleasant evening with a soldier under good 
auspices and without any intrusive restrictions, 
while the declassees, whom there is no attempt to 
exclude, being on the whole less intelligent and at- 
tractive, suffer in comparison; and the men grad- 
ually tend to drop them in favor of their more 
scrupulous sisters. 

All of these things will increase the percentage of 
men who retain their orginal principle, by making 
the cost less severe at the critical moment. But no 
amount of effort can eliminate the intrinsic difficulty 
of keeping straight. Times of war are inevitably 
times when the staying power of a man's scruples 
is put to the severest test; when there is a rapid 
slaughter of the morally unprepared and the morally 
weak; and when the fine and strong come out the 
finer and stronger for the ordeal. There is nothing 
in the new situation which makes it either necessary 
or probable that any man will lose the fight, unless 
it is that when the numerous moments come in 
which he asks himself the question, "Why not?" he 
has no certain answer to give. And this fact in- 



WAE AND WOMEN 183 

dicates where the real remedy and prophylactic must 
be sought. 

A Canadian banker, returning on the same ship 
with me from Liverpool, told me that he had a son 
in training who would soon be ready to go to the 
front. "I am, of course, concerned for his safety," 
he said, "but I am a hundred times more concerned 
for his standards. The only thing that I worry 
over, as I think of him, is the question whether 
he will come back as sound of spirit as he is now." 
"What reasons have you given him for keeping 
straight?" I asked. "No reasons. He knows well 
enough what is right and what is wrong, just as well 
as he knows black from white." 

I would not wish to be behind this Scotch-Cana- 
dian father in my respect for the moral intuitions. 
But I have no faith that intuition is a sufficient reli- 
ance under any circumstances — still less under 
present circumstances. If an intuition is valid, there 
are assignable reasons for it; and to have the rea- 
sons — together with a proviso that the reasons are 
never complete — is an important reserve to fall 
back upon. I should want to add to the arsenal of 
any boy of mine a few reasons for the standard of 
conduct I believe in. And it seems to me that every 
American soldier could, with advantage, be re- 
minded in advance that America has its own stand- 
ards, which have a reasonable claim upon his par- 
ticular regard. 

For if we, in America, have any achievement in 



184 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

the field of civilization to be proud of — apart from 
our great experiment in democracy — it is our atti- 
tude towards women. I am making no claim for 
national righteousness such as might be shown (or 
more probably disproved) by comparative statistics 
of disease and crime. I am simply saying that 
America, the assimilating America, in spite of the 
struggle of all the traditions in the melting-pot, has 
a genuine nationality, a state of public mind, re- 
flected in literature and art as well as in law and 
custom. And without attempting to define more 
explicitly the American attitude towards women, or 
to describe the free and comradely and honestly 
chivalrous relations that have grown out of it here 
and there, I simply state it as my belief that in this 
respect we have hit upon something worthy of par- 
ticular adherence, because its principles are valid 
everywhere. 

There are always two ways of taking differences 
of temperament and their expression in custom and 
manners. One may say, " Customs vary, and each 
mode of life is justified on its own ground : morality 
is a matter of the folkways, the mores which can 
make anything right." Or he may say, " There is 
a better and a worse in the case; and our way is 
better." The latter sounds dogmatic and narrow; 
it seems to stand for an attitude which would render 
all possible broadening effects of travel null and 
void from the start. My own deliberate judgment is 
that, in this case, it is the truth. If we judge, with 



WAB AND WOMEN 185 

the prevalent social philosophy, that every custom 
is justified by its existence, we should recommend to 
our boys to ' * do in Rome as the Romans do ' ' — or as 
they appear to do. Already, largely under the in- 
fluence of European literature and habit, many 
tendencies in social psychology current among us 
have been favoring (as immature cosmopolitanism 
always does) the complete surrender of American 
peculiarities on this point, as being merely provin- 
cial. 

If we decline to make this surrender, or if we can- 
not accept the theory that each custom is justified in 
its own habitat, we must have our reasons. And 
there are two reasons in particular which lead me to 
adhere to the American view. 

First : prostitution, even in its kindliest guises, is 
inconsistent with democracy. It implies stratifica- 
tion, at least among women ; and a relegation of one 
stratum to a lower level by those very men who 
claim the privilege of moving freely in both levels. 
A relationship which you are unwilling to acknowl- 
edge among your other relationships can accord 
with the ideas only of those who regard some hu- 
man beings as so much better than others that the 
others are only fit to serve them. But no man who 
supposes himself fighting for democracy can afford 
to admit into his life any such contradictory prin- 
ciple. 

Second : every human relation has its obligations ; 
and there is one obligation which, as I see it, goes 



186 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

with all human relationships. It is the obligation of 
treating every human being according to what that 
being is capable of, not according to what he or she 
at the moment is. Every man, on this basis, is the 
guardian of the better self of every person he deals 
with, including the woman who waives her own 
claim to such regard. He cannot without damage 
to himself use her for his pleasure and sign off this 
general obligation of respect, not to mention the 
more specific obligations naturally growing out of 
that relationship. 

The thing we have gone out to fight is a form of 
cynicism — cynicism accepted as a philosophy of 
life, and with a great army behind it. Cynicism is 
simply the consistent denial of the two principles 
we have mentioned: it estimates human nature in 
material terms and is consequently ready to exploit 
it without responsibility ; it rejects moral democracy 
in favor of moral privilege and social duplicity. The 
greatest peril of war, and one of its common tend- 
encies, is that the cynicism of the enemy should 
subtly infect and conquer the forces brought against 
him, even while he is being driven from the field. 

But we have also to look beyond the war to the 
unprecedented task in which our fighting men are 
to join with the rest of us in cutting away from our 
civilization the cynical elements which have brought 
this wreck upon it, and in building an honester and 
better world. For this task no clarity of head and 
no firmness of resolution can be too great. There is 



WAR AND WOMEN 187 

a practical consideration which has had its part in 
shaping the American standard, and which will have 
increasing weight everywhere in the years ahead 
of us, namely, that the serious work of the world is 
too pressing to allow responsible men to play with 
the absorbing entanglements of the irregular games 
of sex. Only the simple life of the family is com- 
patible with that repose and whole-heartedness of 
effort which can carry men or nations to the level 
of achievement henceforth demanded of them. For 
both men and nations, the line between success and 
failure, or between greatness and mediocrity, will be 
close drawn ; and the powerful impetus of sex inter- 
est must be interpreted so that it will second and 
magnify the force of the main thrust of life, not 
oppose or confuse it. 

These are some of the reasons which lead me to 
believe in, and to plead for, the American standard 
as valid everywhere. There is a certain proportion, 
I believe a large proportion, of our men that will 
remain straight under any circumstances. They 
are deterred from the easier course not by any fear 
of physical results, nor by regulations, nor by any 
overt reasons ; but simply by an ingrained soundness 
of feeling, or by a sense of right lying deeper than 
the human level. And many another man will lose 
his mooring for a time, recognize the fact, and pull 
himself together. Those who are swept into the cur- 
rent are men whose standards have only a conven- 
tional and superficial footing, or none at all; in 



188 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

them our civilization has already failed. If we do 
our part, most of our boys will come back the better 
for their experience — provided the war does not last 
too long. 

And our part I It is first of all to achieve a better 
grasp of our own convictions, such as they are ; and 
to weed out from them all that is merely traditional 
and inert. It is as fatal to condemn what is harm- 
less as to approve what is wrong. Nowhere, per- 
haps, is the right balance between meaningless 
rigidity and ruinous laissez faire so hard to strike. 
Hospitality of mind together with firmness of 
character will alone fit us for meeting the strains of 
the moment, and save the day for the America of to- 
morrow. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 

The effects of war upon human nature depend very- 
much on its duration. The whole problem of morale, 
from the military angle, changes with the prolonga- 
tion of the war. The difficulties of dealing with fear 
and with the inner frictions of a raw military ma- 
chine diminish. The difficulties of inciting fresh in- 
terest and the unlimited faith that often works mili- 
tary miracles, increase. And for the soldier, the 
memory of his civil self begins to grow unclear, as 
the routine parts of the business of war-making 
settle into second nature, and the more insidious and 
subconscious parts of the strain of war begin to do 
their work. 

This does not mean that a long war affects all men 
alike. The constantly recurring question, Does war 
improve men or deteriorate them? is a question 
which has no answer. For war itself does neither 
one thing nor another. Certainly neither war nor 
any other drastic experience leaves men where it 
found them. But any exposure of large bodies of 
men to extraordinary conditions will segregate them 
into two groups, those who are strengthened by the 
ordeal and those who are weakened by it. And, as a 
matter of common sense, the longer the campaign, 
the larger the probable number in the latter class; 

189 



190 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

the more need for a certain amount of forethought, 
and perhaps for a degree of psychological insight to 
show where the subtler strains are located. 

The human being builds habits and unbuilds them 
more readily than any other animal: there is a 
wholly unmeasured amount of " come-back" in men 
who have been thrown out of their normal grooves 
for a period of years. It is not hard to lose ready 
use of a foreign language; but it is next to impos- 
sible for most people to forget it beyond fairly easy 
recovery; and the same is true of other acquired 
abilities. This fact should lighten the reasonable 
anxiety of many men who feel it as one of the deeper 
wastes of war that their former skills and powers 
are irrevocably dropping from them by disuse. And 
it should also remind us that even a warping strain 
has less effect than at the time it seems to have. 

There are two ways in particular in which these 
longer strains of war may affect morale, which are 
sometimes as puzzling as the "going stale" of an 
athlete in the midst of his training, and quite as 
worth an effort to understand. The one touches 
with a sort of psychological blight his pugnacity, or 
fighting temper; the other his sense of solidarity 
with his nation. 

To speak of the first. One might expect that as 
the soldier becomes expert in the business of kill- 
ing, and as that mental difficulty which at first 
brought out the trait of "severity" disappears into 
habit, he would go to his fighting with greater relish, 



THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 191 

and like Achilles ''put might into his rage." If, 
instead, might somehow leaks out of it, the reason 
may lie, not in the revulsion that follows all passion, 
but rather in the subconscious logic of the case. 

For while it is a part of the mental achievement of 
the soldier that he holds his own life at no high 
value, and that of his enemy at less than nothing, it 
is a part of his creed as a soldier and a citizen that 
the lives at home, the lives which directly or indi- 
rectly he is defending, have a high value, sometimes 
one says, a sacred value. It is not easy to keep these 
two divergent estimates of the value of different 
human lives from spreading and interfering with 
one another to some extent. And it stands to rea- 
son that the person whose preoccupation day and 
night is the destruction of the enemy, who re- 
joices, and ought to rejoice, in the numbers he 
has accounted for as an Indian in his scalps, 
in whom the hunting instinct and the game in- 
stinct come to lend an aboriginal zest to the work 
of war (a trait by no means confined to the firing 
line), and who of necessity becomes all but indiffer- 
ent to the spectacle of suffering, mutilation and 
death, — it stands to reason that this person may 
find his sense of the "sacred value of human life" 
somewhat dulled. Yet it is this sense upon which 
the whole fabric of "human rights" is built, which 
is the parent of our wrath when these rights are 
violated, and so stands at the basis of every cause 
worth fighting for. Hence the deepening paradox 



192 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

iii the soldier's position, that there is in the busi- 
ness of fighting a tendency to undermine the lively 
sense of the things worth fighting for, and there- 
with his own fighting- spirit. 

With time, it is always likely that a certain num- 
ber will succumb to this trend. Confused by the clash 
of the principles that fit their divergent selves, they 
allow the self of the foreground to cancel the self 
of the ideal background which alone justifies their 
business, becoming "hardened veterans" in more 
senses than one, falling back on a dour superiority 
to all "sentiment," like the old Prussian soldier who 
said that after twenty-two years of campaigning, he 
had come to loathe the very sound of such words as 
justice, loyalty, honor, etc., associated as they were 
in his mind with the purely pragmatic employment 
of spurring men to fight. A soldier can work a good 
deal of this skeptical tough-mindedness into his dis- 
position without ceasing to be very dependable fight- 
ing-material, — up to a certain point. It is sufficient 
to say, however, that the morale that comes of it is, 
at best, of the Prussian type : it is capable of strong 
things, but not of the limitless elan of those legions 
of young devotees that went into the slaughter at 
Mons, a-t Vimy, at Verdun, at Gallipoli, and whose 
comparative fighting value is now evident on the 
fields of France. The mentality which comes of the 
surrender of the man in the soldier to his fore- 
ground is not the soldierly mentality, though it may 
pose as such : it is the dry rot of soldierdom. 



THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 193 

Most of our soldiers carry with them the natural 
antidote for this disease. Whatever part of the 
profession of arms may take root in their affection, 
the carnage itself is kept outside. Few men, what- 
ever their occupation, are wholly hypnotized by 
their own " business-personalities," and least of all 
the soldier. Particularly in the fantastic business of 
war, there are strange psychological eddies and un- 
dercurrents ; and the mental bents that come out of 
it are not the obvious ones. Frequently it is the 
surgeon — whose whole professional activity is gov- 
erned by the principle of saving life — that becomes 
callous and wholesale; whereas the soldier, whose 
practical purpose is wrapped up in the toll of his 
slaughter, may acquire in his habitual feeling a 
solemn gentleness like that sometimes attributed to 
the angel of death. 

Morale may also be subtly affected in a long war — 
and this is the second point of which we were going 
to speak — by a falling out of touch and out of step 
between soldiers and civilians, so that the sense 
of solidarity with one's own nation is gradually 
weakened. 

It has always hitherto been one of the incidents of 
a long war that the civil and the military mentalities 
tended to diverge, through the accumulated effects 
of feeding on a different set of experiences and 
thoughts. Unless there are counteracting influ- 
ences, all divisions tend to increase: and while the 



194 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

soldier is likely to find himself the specialist in 
action, with insufficient diet of thought and feeling, 
he is for the same reason likely to think of the rest 
of the nation, whether civil or official, as the special- 
ists in talking and theorizing, too far away from the 
facts as he sees them to be trustworthy guides and 
directors. 

In the present war there has so far been very little 
of the friction and sense of divergence between the 
two groups. Yet there have been occasional expres- 
sions from the civilian side of a more or less wistful 
sense that some impassable gulf has arisen between 
the stay-at-homes and those who have plunged into 
the physical maelstrom. 

And there have been occasional observations from 
the military side of a failure of civilian sympathy. 
"An army," writes a soldier on leave, "does not live 
by munitions alone, but also by the fellowship in a 
moral idea, and that you cannot give. ' ' The civilian, 
the writer felt, is too easily able to relieve his con- 
sciousness of the insistent physical torment of war, 
the suffering of others. He has the proper senti- 
ment toward it all : he can use the right words, even 
more violent words ; but this is what makes the situa- 
tion most painful. For he cannot fill these words 
with the meaning they have for the soldier : he can- 
not know what they mean, and decency would recom- 
mend silence. "Oh, how I wish they would all shut 
up ! " Mr. Jacks reports one such soldier as putting 
it. In my wanderings from war zone to capital 



THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 195 

cities and back again, one impression was every- 
where repeated and deepened, — how immensely the 
gamut of human experience in war time is extended, 
how far apart the extremes are in all sensible 
particulars, how much is trusted to the vicarious- 
ness of our minds;* and because of all this, how 
dangerously society is organized. A step from 
a Paris street full of the soldiers of a dozen na- 
tions, from a conversation perhaps with a man 
just now from the front, into some formal tea-room 
managed it may be by great ladies for the "benefit" 
of these same soldiers, would sometimes start a 
doubt whether all our present stock of wisdom and 
imagination are enough to span these distances, and 
hold the understandings of the world together. 

But it is hardly a misfortune, if different ways 
of looking at things arise from wide differences of 
experience : it would be a misfortune if they did not 
arise. Society can ill afford to lose the pioneer's 
view of itself, even if it involves the conviction that 
many things in it, and many people, still need to be 
shaken up. My own fear is rather that reflections 
of this sort, among our own soldiers, may not yet 
have struck deep enough. 

The sense of divergence only becomes a menace 
to morale, in or out of the army, when the soldier 
mentally gives society up, adopts fatalistic views 
of human stupidity and selfishness, and decides that 
the breach of sympathy is hopeless. This kind of 

♦Page 48. 



196 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

pessimism can never take root while thoughtful men 
on each side are as alert as they are to the need of 
keeping the ways of understanding open, while 
everything written or spoken by soldiers is eagerly 
consumed by the public, and while the various 
civilian agencies accompanying the army, and 
rapidly becoming skilled in the arts of mental mid- 
dlemen, continue to serve as an army of interpreters 
between the two groups of minds. It will be hard 
to kill the essential sympathy between them, so long 
as the deeper common sense of the soldier — fully 
aware that the State he serves is not identical with 
this or that group of civilians — continues its hope- 
ful comment on his occasional bitter or melancholy 
reactions. 

And after all, this deeper judge and self -critic in 
the soldier's mind is the essential thing in the whole 
psychological outcome of war-making. No one can 
say what effect war, be it short or long, will have on 
human beings unless he knows the longest thoughts 
of those beings. It is the slant of the mind that 
determines what 'effect' any cause shall have. To 
take a minor instance : there are probably few sol- 
diers at the front who are not familiar with the feel- 
ing of being an almost negligible atom in the im- 
mense business of war. What 'effect' will such a 
feeling produce on one's temper? If the soldier 
happens to be a character of Barbusse, it may be 
this: 



THE LONGER STRAINS OP WAR 197 

"In all that, you see what we amount to, we who 
are here ... so many drops of blood amid the 
deluge of men and things, ' ' — 

a sense of exposure and helplessness, promising to 
reduce morale sooner or later to the passive variety. 
If it happens to be another French soldier, this time 
a real one, the effect may be this : 

"With it all comes the consciousness of one's own 
role, which is humble and yet great. For that wall 
is a wall of steel made of glittering, separate points, 
— and I am one of them!"* 

And thus it is with all the other pressures of war 
upon character : the bent they produce will vary with 
the ideas upon which they fall, and defeat all obvious 
prophecies. We have no right even to assert that 
war will generate in men a "military point of view." 
To argue that men who have been long schooled in 
this or that of the ways of war will therefore be 
enamored of those ways is to leave human nature 
out of the calculation. 

One fine day on top of a London bus a lad sat 
down beside me, and after a minute or two of silence 
burst out with the remark, "Gee, but these feel 
good ! ' ' " These, ' ' I learned after some vain specu- 
lation, were his civilian clothes. "It's the first time 
I've been in 'em for three years." Then I noticed 
the bandage where one of his hands should have 
been, and understood his further words: "I got 
off lucky, believe me ; and I 'm going back to Amer- 
ica, the first ship." What this lad felt at the mo- 

*From "The Lieutenant's Story," Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1917, 
p. 280. 



198 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

ment about his clothes, many another lad will feel 
about various inner aspects of war-making. The law 
of habit, as we have found it*, is a spiritual law: it 
is the ultimate attitude, not the visible practice, that 
decides what states of mind will come out of the war. 

The soldier's life is unsettled: will that produce 
in him a habit of restlessness and roving 1 ? He is 
accustomed to destroy, not to construct: will that 
make of him a waster, and put him out of patience 
with the slow building of production? He is used 
to sensational and sudden effectiveness: will this 
impose on him a dramatic or melodramatic mind, 
make all "piping times of peace" dull to him, and 
unnerve him for all quiet labor? He is habituated 
to consuming, living by requisition on goods sup- 
plied lavishly (sometimes) by others: will this 
create in him the temper of dependency? 

The soldier has been through-and-through an 
executive, schooled in sharp decision, braced for 
grim issues involving the overthrow of an enemy: 
will he now be unfit for judicial thinking, and will 
" adjustment' ' in the give and take of social con- 
struction, — will "adjustment" seem to him a vile 
and loathsome word? He has been drilled in army 
methods and "system": will he come back believing 
that all things can be achieved by strategy and an- 
alysis, and carried out "by the numbers"? Will he 
desire to storm education, culture, art, religion it- 
self by "intensive methods"? Or will he come back 

•Page 125. 



THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 199 

eager to discard the more mechanical linkages of 
man to man, and to cherish the role of reflection, 
leisure, the listening mind, the mystical element m 
all spiritual efficiency? 

Above all, the soldier nas borne the brunt, and he 
knows it What will be the effect of that? What 
argument is it building up in him to-day? "Now, 
civilians, our share is done : we rest on our laurels ; 
give us our leisure, and our rewards"? Or is it 
this : ' ' We have learned to choose the harder part, 
and to do more than our share ; give us your heaviest 
burdens, and we will show you how men can carry 
them"? 

There is no prophet who ought to venture an an- 
swer to these questions, unless he can see with what 
hidden approvals, rebellions, provisos, the alleged 
'habits' are being accepted. It is a man's idea, his 
philosophy, that fixes the angle of impact of all ex- 
perience upon him, and so decides what 'effect' 
that experience will have. But by the same sign it 
can be said with some certainty that if the ideas 
with which a man is carrying on his service are 
right at the core, its total effect on him — whatever 
its character or duration — will be for the better: 
he will come out of it broadened, liberated, ennobled 
by the daily companionship with duty, wise with the 
wisdom of one who has explored the extremes of 
the human lot. 

No one need fear that the beauty of the gratitude 
of a delivered world will make our returning soldiers 



200 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 

over-proud ; the reverse will be the case. But there 
will be men in ihat multitude who will keep the next 
generation true to the genuine proportions ot things, 
because what they have seen they can neither forget 
nor allow others to forget. 

"We have been so long on the frontiers of hu- 
manity that we may cross over from one moment to 
another. Beyond the border, everything is stripped 
of superfluities, is reduced to lowest terms. In this 
collapse of animate matter, in this besetting destruc- 
tion, we naturally attribute less vital force to the 
body that is so quickly shattered than to the thought 
that abides."* 

In such minds, war, the most drastically phys- 
ical of all human works, does indeed become the 
vehicle for the most spiritual of achievements. And 
the morale springing from such philosophy may be 
counted on to win the wars that lie beyond the war. 

♦Henri Malherbe in La Flamme au Poing. 



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